Author: Melissa Ramos

Driving at Night

Samantha Godwin

The spreading tide of asphalt

awash in the flow of darkness

and pelican flashes of headlights

dipping across the surface.

It is so light and so dark you don’t know where you are.

You are the world’s bookmark,

slipped between pages

but separate from the words.

You could easily slip out,

out from the road and the dark woods

and the stuttering eyes of passing cars.

You lift your hands from the wheel,

the seat of their control.

The truth is that there is no control.

You can close your eyes and suck your teeth

and still hurtle down the interstate.

You can keep a steady grip and feel your blood

thrum to the rhythm of rubber and road

and still crash.

God lays out the Ley lines.

We merely start the car.

Samantha Godwin

Last Nightmare

Alannah Radburn

It was just last nightmare,
as I unwound my braid by the window…
Busy fingers glazed in slow candle light, the wax drips.
Magic is a supple blade: it can take away as easily as she gives. Slow words guild my tongue, stained with intention. Soon autumn will come for you.
Slip its way under the crack in the door.
By the time you notice the draft, it will be too cold. Too late.
The leaves are dying my love.
But to me, I croon
everything feels exceptionally alive.

[Alannah Radburn]

New Moon

Thomas Zimmerman

Black lotus in an overturned carafe
of stars, grim Hecate descends, and in
their graves the denizens begin to spin

like dervishes. You hear but cannot see
the neighbors’ belled barn-cat. Your hot breath’s like
a bit that cuts your thought, and there’s no other

way to say it—you feel horsey. Murmurs
rise like specters through the dull green mist,
there at the crossroad hedge. The grass curls black

wherever her feet tread. Her left hand holds
a goblet, your hand’s in her right. A dog
somewhere barks three times, sharp, and something in

you hammers like the making of a blade.
She’s cut the lights but never touched the switch.
Your trembling fingers check: the bulb’s still hot.

Thomas Zimmerman

The Night the Ghosts Screamed

James G. Piatt

I listened to the raucous screaming of ghosts in the dark night hours. Their eyes opened and shut in rapid motion, trying to inhale the moon’s silver beams. I tried to sleep and dream during the lapses of such horrible screaming, and as I twisted and turned, my fears crept into Infinity.

I felt the icy wind that wafted through my flesh, and bones, sewing darkness into my thoughts while the ghosts screamed in the language of bereavement, hoping I would succumb. The rusting hours of the echoing night stitched into an unreality, left me with a sense of despair. I searched for metaphors to smother the haunting voices of the ghosts as they screamed into the mysterious emptiness of the dark moonless night, but to no avail, until I died.

James G. Piatt

Vanishing Point

Allene Nichols

She’s waiting there, just at the horizon
like some hackneyed ghost
from an old black and white movie

Her nightgown flows around her
and her moans float like lily pads
on a stagnant movie pond

If she turns her back, you must follow
because the compulsion is strong
and because you might love her

She might lead you back to that night
long ago, when you drowned in lullabies
and awoke to a world without shadows

She might lead you to the time
when you began to fight the seaweed
and refuse to let it pull you down

She might lead you straight to hell
and last time you were there
it was glorious and worth the price

Do you recognize her crooked smile,
the one you see each morning,
in the bathroom mirror?

Allene Nichols

My descent into meaning

Peter Wood

pace by pace I stumble
through a brief corridor haunted
with statues of demons glowing
from purple-red lights perched above
with flowing satin draped behind

farther below a chamber presents itself
teeming with ecstasy raw unkept
the air neither hot nor cold and
slowly filling with a brisk fog
which rises from floor to nostrils

entranced in the aura I feel awake
yet divorced from sudden movement
after years of searching I have arrived
my home an abode where clocks tock
echoing from hardwood unseen

this might have scared me before
dark mysterious and uncertain
but much of what I once feared
is now the apex of who I became
so I walk gently toward the ether

eyelids sealed I immerse myself
in either an orgy of bodies or spirits
unconcerned with which it is
chest calm and mind whispering
to the rhythm of a dangling pocketwatch

Peter Wood

Anatomy of Solitude

Marielle Songy

My head is a tin can,
bitter and hollow with
envy- emerald green and
rotting, dragging flies to
its wake.

My chest is an empty shell,
laborious breathing as I try
to comprehend the gravity
of a dead winter dripping in
failed possibility.

My eyes are light switches
flashing off and on- breaking
the depth of the darkness
with quiet stares, recording
memory like a ledger.

My heart is a hollow drum
keeping time in a delicate
minuscule of an ant crawling
across the leaf of an oak tree
in the middle of autumn.

My lungs are accordions
playing a gentle cacophony
that wills me to wake each
morning with the sunrise and
dew on unmowed grass.

My gut is a bowl overflowing
with doubtful questions
raised in rage, regret, and
everlasting mournfulness
hanging heavy.

My hands are tidal waves
pushing away evil entities,
pulling in goodness with the tide-
hope crashing on the shore in
a delicate symphony.

Marielle Songy

Werewolves

Jason B. Crawford

Your friends say it is a full moon tonight—
so you need to come outside
to go dance in a club soaked in gut
saturated with enough fear to cut open
let it spill out on the dance floor like fresh silver

You protest—there will be loaded tongues
dipped in melted spoons—
But you go;
Put on your best teeth
Comb the flesh out of your fur;
You are ready

And it is here
boys say teach me
to give permission to
let another empty them

mouth drying out
like an oven split open
Where everyone has learned to read you
Like a library of fangs

And you wonder if this music
is another form of grief;
If the beat keeps dropping
to its knees one last time
and your hips are just trying to catch
as many funerals as they can

But it’s here
you’re not a rabbit in a cave of wolves
yet rather a wolf
And the bats don’t circle around you too closely
for fear you might open your mouth
pour out the starlight you hold in your lungs

It is here
you don’t see a man
that might see you a river
free to drink from

You don’t really see men here at all
just children
dancing cloud to cloud for each song,
Blooming celebration every time a comet shower
makes backdrop for the moon

And oh the moon!
How we call it mother
How we dress it in heels and a contour
How in front of her
we undress our own human husks
Leave them somewhere by the shore

How we howl
and prance
and think nothing of the hunters
or their arrows
or bullets
or laws

How we can be of this wild here
until the last song plays
and the moon turns to dip behind
the curtain of the trees

while we grab our coats
to be human again
to be hidden once more

Jason B. Crawford