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POETRY BY STEPHANIE SMITH

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In addition to The Horror Zine, Stephanie Smith’s poetry and fiction has appeared in such publications as PIF Magazine, Whistling Shade, Dark Moon Digest, The Literary Hatchet, Abyss & Apex, Illumen, and Liquid Imagination. You can find her on Twitter @horrorsteph78 or imajican.blogspot.com

POETRY BY STEPHANIE SMITH

TOMES

There are secrets to dying
There are tomes for the dead
Shelves of cryptic lunacy
spread among eternal passageways
A labyrinth that whispers psychotic syllables
no mortal can comprehend

Still, lovers roam such melancholy halls
bleeding poetry from their grieving lips
Songs of madness and broken hearts
Sonnets equipped to tear them apart

It’s true, then, the dead can read in the dark
Endless pages of pleasure and pain
They can recall every lyric,
each torturous refrain they stole from living breath
all too willing to accept the grave

A SONG OF THE GRAVE

Your skin is made of a maggot’s dream
A shy man forced into the limelight
Condemned to pull rabbits out of funeral hats

The day turns gangrenous and black
In the backyards of long ago childhoods
When we were afraid to come out and play

Still, you open your mouth to scream
And all the torments of the grave spill out—
The sweetest song I've ever heard

You emerge from your shell all rotted and white
With stories to tell of an afterlife
That is nothing like what we expected:

It is the product of a dream gone sour
The chorus of the dead in our ears
Begging for mercy

I spend hours listening to the din
The cacophony of the chaotic grave
And savoring every second

FINAL BREATH

From the Stygian depths the hungry ghost
grasps the final breath of a dying song

Along the haunted shores of a blood red sea
a homeless dream looks for a place to rest

The risen dead roam from one verse to the next
craving flesh and electricity, an escape from the pain

The exhausted moon crawls out from night’s refrain
while monsters hide behind the light of epileptic stars

The graveyards are alive tonight. I can feel it in my bones
There are those who still linger long after death—

Restless spirits who float on the foul wind
singing dirge songs and ebon lullabies—

The children of twilight who cry for their mothers
when they fall from the cradle of the carnivorous sky