The May Editor's Pick Poet is Ghia Vitale

Please feel free to email Ghia at: veritaserumvial@hotmail.com

SOME WORDS WITH AN ANGEL

A voice no sane mind remembers,
With eyes like dawning Novembers.
His face was cloaked in night.
All right—
I’ll tell you what he said…

Something about when the world ends,
He’ll spend it with his many friends.
So deliciously gaunt,
They’ll haunt,
And dance on Earth’s deathbed.

I asked him where his soul came from:
“A state of mass-delirium,
Where love is never maimed,”
He claimed
With truth in his laughter.

Though his words were happily minced,
No one has seen his shadow since,
But he left me with this:
One kiss,
To live ever after.

FOR YOU, MY LOVE

My love for you is a waking nightmare.
A fallen halo, wreathed in poison oak,
That carries venomous balefire smoke,
Contaminating all lungs and fresh air.

My love for you is the burning candle,
Dying, like the waning wick set aflame,
Smoldering from the mere thought of your name,
To make matter decay and dismantle.

It is the same love that slits the sweet throat,
Of a firstborn upon the stone altar,
Seasoned with chants—all fruiting life falters,
Where it sleeps on your property, remote.

When my will was fulfilled by this black hex,
I went to the pagan cemetery,
To your plot, unmarked by statuary,
With your lover to enjoy kinky sex.

THE SILENT TREATMENT

Like all the things that you hold dear,
Through the opaque lens of your eyes,
Watch closely as I disappear.

Tongues that dull the sharpest spear.
Physics of the mind, love defies,
Like all the things that you hold dear.

Insipid silence, so sincere,
Imparts long-lived truths of the Wise.
Watch closely as I disappear.

Each day becomes another year,
I prosper as your spirit dies,
Like all the things that you hold dear.

Come one and all from far and near—
Witness spectacular demise!
Watch closely as I disappear.

Should your vision ever be clear,
You’ll understand who truly cries.
Like all the things that you hold dear,
Watch closely as I disappear.

Ghia Vitale is a writer from Long Island. She recently graduated from Purchase College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in literature as well as minors in psychology and sociology. Although she has won awards for poetry in the past, The Horror Zine was the first publication to feature her poetry. Quail Bell has also featured two of her poems.

Ghia Vitale wrote an acedemic paper titled “Manfred: An Accursed Druidic Shaman,” an examination of Lord Byron’s Manfred through the lens of two poems from Edgar Allan Poe’s first anthology. In this literary analysis, she explains how the protagonist of Manfred is a druidic shaman who is traumatized by his occult knowledge. Purchase College published this academic paper.