The August Selected Poet is

Stephanie Smith

Please feel free to email Stephanie at: imajican1978@yahoo.com

GRAVEYARD ACTIVITY

Hungry ghosts hover over graves
craving a good night’s sleep

Isolated souls
search for a sense of peace

But lost loves
mingle beneath the summer moon

happy to be free of the death
that took them all too soon

TWILIGHT IN THE GRAVEYARD

In the graveyard the shadows hide
in the corners of descending twilight.

The dead, deaf in coffins, lie
while mourners, at home in evening’s mist,

reminisce of soaring past sunsets.
But gold skies turn black in the blink of an eye.

This house is not a home anymore
but a cold tomb where hope goes when it dies.

MONSTERS

Rainy nights of lucid dreams
Chronic remorse revisiting
things of vision and sights unseen

Unseemly things crawl through the streets
hunting the flesh of human beings

The children flee their beds,
awakening a wonder
of what lurks outside

They dash to the windows
while parents arm themselves with knives,
sure Satan has arisen from the abyss

Mommy pretends it’s just a nightmare
This isn’t real, she says

But beneath the heel of this made-up monster
Mommy winds up dead

STUFFING

When they cut him open
moths flew out

They found flowers in his chest;
a honey-slathered heart
where bees buzzed and swarmed
in a chaotic chorus

They pulled ants from his eyelids
and worms from his ears

They tore at his skin,
straight through to the bone
But never found what
they were looking for

ET MOI?

What about me
who holds your hand,
sings you the songs
the rain cannot?

What about the times
spent in tombs of the rich?
We sprinkled their gold
over scones at tea time.

You claim you can
talk to the dead.

And me?

I’m waiting for them
to answer back.

Stephanie Smith is a poet and writer from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in such publications as Black-Listed Magazine, Decomp, Gutter Eloquence, House of Horror, and Yellow Mama. Her first poetry chapbook, Dreams of Dali, is available from Flutter Press.