POETRY BY MEG SMITH

Meg Smith is a writer, journalist, dancer and events producer living in Lowell, Massachusetts. 

In addition to previously appearing in The Horror Zine, her work has been published in Sirens Call, Dark Dossier, Raven Cage, The Cafe Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Aphelion, and many more. 

She is author of five poetry books and a short fiction collection, The Plague Confessor.

She welcomes visits to megsmithwriter.com. 

BRING ON THE SEA MONSTERS

Give all that is love
in the salt brine.
Give all that is love—
rushing of green waves,
the dark sun of breathing
in the murky salt.
Hold me, deeply,
in the fathoms of blushing foam.
Some evolution,
some primordial place
like falling teeth,
fingers of the dark-sea night.

SUMMON THE FLIES

The rasping of wings
measures a summer
of ghost-eyed kittens
in a cardboard box.
The sun snarls in a predator’s
seaweed claws. We create night
with a blanket and a creaking fan.
Outside, the chorus taps at the
window screen—carmine eyes, black legs
of mustering logic. We did not call
but they came to wait.
We deny them with love.
We deny them with fire.
One day the sun will rush away to space,
and wither our drama of burial
and funerary flight.

FALL OF THE WOVEN STAR

Once, we gathered on the rocky shore
as frost chipped at the stones.
Mirror on mirror of driftwood fire,
a song might puzzle out truth
or might not. In the darkness,
night meets the lip of the water.
An island of apples lingers,
but only in whispers and low sighs.
An island of apples looms, created,
but folding itself in the fog.

BLOODY BRIDE

A veil tears and falls,
with flames lashing
scarlet to copper
running to the floor
like wax, in dark waves.
All of it, the kiss, the vow,
the cutting of roses
to night’s roots.