Two poems from my work in progress High Ashes appear in the new print issue of The Horror Zine, “the genre’s Ground Zero where horror legends merge with the talents of tomorrow.” You can buy the issue here.

Specimen


The dreams are softened cysts, swollen polyps 
Afloat in jars of preserving alcohol 
Along the wall of the hidden basement lab,

Sealed up ever since its owner passed away. 
Prisms fan slowly inside the jars when the sun 
Slants down, a myth in dusty winter glass. 

No one remembers what happened to the key. 
It’s likely buried with the woman who
Once owned the place. Inside the cloudy jars, 

Twitches, stirrings in dwindled liquid, 
Small sounds that must be only echoes, 
Taps and soft scratches at the glass, 

So much unseen, and ice-packed windowpanes,
Where sun through spider-webs once warmed the jars, 
Now muffled like the wind that moves the snow.

AirBNB

★☆☆☆☆


It looked OK online, but nothing like the place
I found when I arrived that week to find
Some keys dangling from the rusty lock out back. 
Something’s wrong with the house; I don’t know what:

Its angles, mildews, spidery cracked glass, 
The way it holds or pushes off the sunlight
That steals through heavy pines that brush 
The eaves in the wind. I found it hard to sleep, 

More so when a storm arrived, a rising 
And sinking rush, so much like waves, releasing 
Needles and twigs to tick on the roof. 
After the storm dragged its way up the coast, 

A silence rested deeply with hints of things 
Stirring in humid corners of other rooms. 
A rich stink of mulch fingered its way down 
From attic crawlspaces above my pillow. 

The shadows gathered closely to the bed
As if to snuff the tiny reading lamp. 
Worse, a portrait of a Confederate 
Lieutenant leaned askew on the mantle. 

The painting captured something I found weird:
A smile, almost glib. Did I see it right? 
It’s nearly imperceptible, the curl 
Of the lip, as if he’d recalled a joke, 

Despite an air of overwhelming despair.
He seemed so tired. He must have been sixty 
When he squeezed into his old uniform
To pose for the painter. It must have been 
 
The last days of McKinley’s presidency. 
Yes, it was there, that smile, if that’s what it was, 
As if mocking me all these decades down. 
Those rooms must surely comfort many ghosts 

Who find themselves with nowhere else to go, 
As if it were some hidden summer retreat 
Of an unremembered royal line, heirs
Of a failing empire overturned at last. 

I’ll never go there again. Just awful. 
The owners failed to return a single call. 
Flies swarmed the kitchen. Lights clicked on and off. 
Still, a week later, back at home, I find 

Myself pulled to see it again. I locate 
The town on Google Earth, wheeling over 
Byways and meadows with my barbed cursor, 
Slipping up the serrated coast, searching 

For the street in the tiny town, hoping to find 
The house itself, or where it should have been. 
I count the homes on the street, firehouse 
On the corner, the roadside vegetable stand, 

All the things I saw from the grimed-up windows 
Of that place, but the house isn’t there. Nothing,
Not even a record of that address. 
The lot is vacant; pines edge an empty square.