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Stephanie Smith

The September Chosen Poet is Stephanie Smith

Please feel free to email Stephanie at:

imajican1978@yahoo.com

stephanie

LOVE LETTERS

I despise your drunken corpse
Your dark landscapes of flesh
Fresh teeth marks set against bleached-white bone
Oh, I miss those waltzes, though
The twisted, gnarled pain
you introduced me to
when the moon became full
and I became lost in your rotted shell
I gnawed my way out
only to find we were one in the same
And the bloodlust that ran
so deep inside of you
is now uncontrollable in me

THE CROSSING

We speak in foreign languages—
a souvenir of nightly sojourns
inside a fairy tale
We lay waiting for the fog to clear,
for the feeling to drain from our throbbing hearts
We bleed into the ground—
throats slashed by blades of grass—
as laughing children in Halloween masks
dance around our makeshift graves,
sprinkling sweetmeats and glitter and silver coins,
conjoined between the dark and light
The dead don’t sing like they used to
and welcome us in silence
We greet them with fiction and foul breath,
the subtle remnant of a terrible dream
we thought we left behind

WE HOLD THESE SOULS IN OUR FOUL MOUTHS

When we were alive and murderous and free
we wandered through the glittering cities
dressed in flesh and animal fur

When all the heavens came crashing down—
and with its precious shards of light—we found
the meaning of black holes

We sang to Man’s gods and burned down their dreams
We needled sigils into our skins
and imagined the crimson rivers beneath

Waiting to drown, we imbibed men’s souls—
hungry for sin and suffering
Madness came like a tidal wave

When our palettes grew dull and feeling wore thin,
when dying words clung to the tips of our tongues,
we stole such poetry to the grave

From beyond we still controlled Man’s fate,
played with their minds,
tasted fear in their hearts,

and prayed they, too, end up here one day,
torn apart and swallowed by
the cold, consuming void

Stephanie Smith is a poet and writer from Scranton, Pennsylvania. In addition to The Horror Zine, her work has appeared in issues of PIF Magazine, Bete Noire, Massacre Magazine, Disturbed Digest, The Literary Hatchet, Illumen, and Strong Verse.