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Sydney Leigh

The November Featured Poet is Sydney Leigh

Please feel free to visit Sydney HERE

Sydney Leigh

WOODLAND SERENADE

How lonely is the crying wolf
that bays at moon which looms above?
The swaying trees sing songs so still,
it’s nature’s art he’s learned to love.

He runs through fields of endless brush,
his race as swift as sweeping sighs;
black shadows painting loneliness,
invisible in haunting eyes.

The hunter locks his gaze upon
this wondrous creature of the night,
and with precision terminates
the freedom of this woodland sprite.

FLESH, BLOOD, AND BONES

It happens at night.
The thin, salty flesh crawls across your bones,
looking for its way home.

It finds, instead, too many mistakes—
grooves and speed bump calcifications,
a poor reward for living.

It doesn’t fit.
If you think about it,
it almost makes sense. Almost.

You told him slowly, carefully,
as the blood drained in haste, that the doves flew away
too soon. The water

still rippled on the lake,
cool, blue steel
shook like a sheet.

The flesh stretches over your face,
holes left for you to see. Hear.
Breathe. Scream. Love. Lick. Lie.

Alone, wishing
you had reached deeper,
that the skin was more…forgiving.

Could you let it go this way?
Allow for a fall
from grace? From higher

up
than you knew they could fly?
Stand aside. It’s moving again.

THE SPIDER BOX

in the thick, sightless
must of dreams,
I am caught, still
in the silkened steel threads
of your tangle web labyrinth;
forever suspended
in the split and rot
of a timber box
forged by the consanguine joints
of a mortise and tenon nightmare.

above us,
cold rain spilled off the pitched lid,
pooling in the moldy soil
and narrow clefts
of moss covered rocks
fringing the wooded lip
of your old tool shed.

there,
you’d come down slowly,
one pair of legs at a time,
stinging bristles
scraping the youth from my skin
in serrated layers.

claw hammers rattled on rusty nails,
and the silver teeth of saws glinted,
catching the amber flames of sun
as it stole through splintered cracks
in the sinking frame.

from somewhere outside,
in the canopy of trees,
the muffled song of a starling
whispered through the wood
while blue venom dripped
from your hollow fangs,
until,
in the pale yellow gaze of a blackbird,
her coda became my own.

your skin glistened
in a chitinous pile
by the door.
you left it there each time,
just before you smiled
and said you’d see me at home.

mother dried the dishes
as I climbed the stairs,
my bare feet
leaving a bitter, viscid print
on every step,
the long empty hall
filled with the muted murmurs
of a passerine lullaby,
echoing
into the theridion silence
of sleep.

Sydney Leigh has been reading and writing horror since she can remember. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in various anthologies and magazines, including Darkness Ad Infinitum from Villipede Publications, Firbolg Publishing’s Enter at Your Own Risk: The End is the Beginning, Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction, Sanitarium Magazine, the Demonic Visions 50 Horror Tales series, The Wicked Library and more. She has written articles and poetry for Merrimack Valley Magazine, edited three anthologies, and reviewed books for Shroud Publishing, Shock Totem Publications, and Hellnotes. Upcoming publications include short fiction and poetry in The Library of the Dead from Written Backwards, Bugs: Tales that Slither, Creep, and Crawl, Book 38, 22 More Quick Shivers, and Our World of Horror from Eldritch Press. She currently works for Villipede Publications—feel free to drop into her website HERE