Category: Poetry

Ghost Trees at Midnight

(nine years after the Bear Butte burn)

Ginger Dehlinger

Black-skinned bones
these spectral spires
shrouded in moon dust
arms akimbo
reach for the sky.

Like zombies
they prefer the dead of night
company of spirits
mask of darkness
cool, bleak silence.

Dead or half-dead
missing limbs
stripped of bark
feet planted
they refuse to topple.

A legion of ghouls
kissed by the devil
scarred
numb to the core
magnificent in moonlight.

Ginger Dehlinger

Crow

J V Birch

the black gloss
of his coat flashes
iridescent blue
his eyes are
bottomless knots
of things he can’t
unsee and in
his mouth a tangle
of sound unravels
when he calls

J V Birch

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]

All Soul’s Night

KB Ballentine

The veil thins . . . shreds. The dead
and living will mingle this night.
Light shrivels, shadows staking claims.
Sea grumbles in the distance, air surging
salt and winter, gulls quarreling
their way home.
Inland, crabapples wither where they fall,
a few leathered leaves hinged
to baring branches.

No black cats, specters or formless mist
will keep me in tonight—too long
since I last breathed you.

KB Ballentine

Roumours and oracles*

Kate Garrett

Seers claimed they were shown the end of Mary:
clouds of red hair swathing the sky over Scotland

with blood like mist – the vertebrae snapped – skin
severed. The boy king locked this vision in his

heart, pulled chains tight around it: no time to love
his faraway mother held in her chambers and turrets.

Nor any inclination – raised by steel-tongued wooden
men – but he forever paled at the suggestion of her

execution, it rolled around his ribcage like a rough-
cut gem, polished over time into deep superstition,

into acceptance. As the years delivered the gore
foretold, a woman whose own alchemy once gave

him life had dwindled to an artefact – a mother
unseen, untouched, unknown. Distant and dead,

one less hurdle to the throne, but left James a legacy
of backward glances – expecting death by axe- by curse.

*King James VI of Scotland & I of England is remembered by many for his persecution of witches. One reason behind this hatred was his fear of a violent death – which was in no small part brought on by the execution of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587. On top of that, Mary’s death was supposedly predicted by those with ‘the sight’ in Scotland throughout his youth, which added to James’s superstitions about those who practiced magic.

Kate Garrett

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