POETRY BY MEG SMITH

Meg Smith is a writer, journalist, dancer and events producer living in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her journalism has been honored with several awards, including first place from the New England Newspaper and Press Association.

Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Horror Zine, Raven Cage, Strange Horizons, Silver Blade, The Cafe Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Sirens Call, Dark Dossier, Dark Moon Digest, and many more. 

She is the creator of Poe in Lowell, a festival honoring Edgar Allan Poe’s three visits to Lowell, and a board member of the board of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! which is a festival honoring Lowell’s native son Jack Kerouac.

She is author of six poetry books and a short fiction collection, The Plague Confessor. She welcomes visits to her HERE 

 

NOBODY’S HAUNT CHICK

Such is the privilege that is a garden of marigolds:
the autumnal whispering to the sun, while slipping
into an array of shadows.
It seems incomprehensible, this wicked conjuring,
the side of the crimson barn, the reach of creeping grass.
It’s been some thirty years, and one thing remains true:
I stand here, alone. I draw close a shawl against
a chill of withered century. In some cathedral of
your own shadows,
go the ghouls, to and fro,
in the slightest of webs, and the silver of laughter,
and this night or that. You may raise up one of them
for some union, some rush of disheveled lace,
but I am not there. I never have been.
I remain among the living.
We may both look toward night,
rising over the shadow of earth now silent, and a barn
painted new, but the moon I see is my own, my very own.

BONES, WAITING

Will you cradle a story within me,
White ark, slender rows letting in
sunlight, soil, the tenderest root?
A wildflower reaches, mushrooms 
congregate. Leaves dither and fall.
Nothing weeps. There is only time.
A truth, receding to the farthest
bed of a core within core.

MOTHER OF CLOUDS

Lift from me this gauze,
for the revelation:
layer of layer, piece of piece,
this covering of my final
discourse. 
Galen has traced these
very veins, these highways
to the dark, open place.

THE WASTING SKY

There’s nothing more to cover us,
or make sense of our bones.
We have only a tree, fallen,
already green with moss
and sighing
in the hum of bees
that have come to claim us.
Above, all retreats without air,
eyeless, breathless.
Still, we see the terrible
veil that brooks no stars.