The October Featured Poet is Ace G. Pilkington

Please feel free to email Ace at aceandolga@yahoo.com

A VAMPIRE DREAMS AT NOON

All the people I used to know come home
To my room and hang upside down; their teeth
Chatter at me disapprovingly, and they smell sweet,
Like clusters of ripe fruit. Such teeth are the seeds
Which I bite out. July is the cruelest time,
When the sun eats the whole sky and night
Shrinks to the size of a hand with one
Finger gone. I have left something undone;
I think I have forgotten to harvest myself.
I am overripe, though not golden, not a shell
For the juices of autumn but a winter apple of wrinkles
And wormwood, stored for years in the cellars
Of fear yet still dangling on a tree which is its own
Crucifixion. All the people that I know (I hold)
Hang with me but suffer separately, fruit made of stones. 

THE MERMAN IN THE FOUNTAIN

There’s an angel in the orchard with bat wings of white leather
Who is hung in bands of willow, his cloven feet together.
There’s a virgin touching apples with a unicorn for warder;
Her hair is dry as sunlight, her mouth a moist disorder.
She hears a merman singing from the moss-bronze of a fountain;
For her that stream of vowels seems deep enough to drown in.
While the unicorn is gorging on the yellow flesh of windfalls,
She sprawls among the slats of light; her legs become a sundial.
The angel’s wings are changing to a black swan kind of charcoal;
His eyes turn green with shadow now he is no longer heart-whole.
She slips into the safety of a bird-dark summer slumber
Where sea-singing is transmuted to a feathery penumbra
And vague angel lovers watch her from the forests of their hunger.

MY NEXT SUCCESS

Welcome, the stars are stirring at the twilight’s edge,
And we will sit to dinner presently. That picture?
A souvenir of richer days and darker tastes,
Though I still find vampires soothe my fears at night.
How not? A monster’s first purpose is to make
Our daily terrors bearable; imagine that the worst
Way in the world to die was through a semi-sexual
Suction at the throat, the thread of blood
Untying the knot of life. Roman suicides tried
To touch such pleasure, slashed wrists streaming
In the warm bath water as the body floated to a last
Consummation. Imagine there was no horror to exceed
That bleeding, no cancers or highway mutilations,
No slow debilities to eat the marrow of dignity,
Or inevitable senilities like dust in an old gallery,
Griming the windows gray. I am sorry;
Come back, and I will speak of vampires once again.
You see, to believe in such an end is a kind of liberty
From other fears, and it is my theory that time
Would slow as a mortal contributed to immortality.
Like a black hole, the red event horizon would keep
The lovers together almost forever, giving ecstasy
And taking it, and no one sure whose pleasure
Was the greater. You would? I must admit I
Always feel as though I were mixing apple blossoms
With snow when I take anyone as beautifully young
As you. I will be seeing your eyes for what seems
Ten thousand years, and whispering similes while we
Fall. Somehow, you don’t appear surprised.
The stars are daggers cutting up the sky.

Ace G. Pilkington has published over one hundred poems, articles, reviews, and short stories in five countries. His poetry has appeared, among other places, in Asimov's, Amazing, Enchanted Conversation, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Mindsparks Science Fiction Poetry Anthology, Spark: A Creative Anthology, Weirdbook, and Weird Tales. He is an active member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the author of Screening Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V. His essays are included in Cambridge University Press's Shakespeare and the Moving Image, and in McFarland’s Star Trek as Myth, and The Films of James Cameron. He is co-editor with Matthew Wilhelm Kapell of The Fantastic Made Visible: Essays on the Adaptation of Science Fiction and Fantasy from Page to Screen. And with his wife, Olga, he is the co-editor and co-translator of Fairy Tales of the Russians and Other Slavs, which includes stories about vampires, werewolves, and other shape shifters. Ace’s book Science Fiction, Futurism, and the Terms and Ideas Behind Them is forthcoming from McFarland in 2016.

He is Professor of English and History at Dixie State University and Literary Seminar director at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, which produced his play Our Lady Guenevere in their New Plays series. He has a D.Phil. in Shakespeare, history, and film from Oxford University.

You can learn more about Ace from his website HERE or on his author page at Facebook