POETRY BY SCOTT J. COUTUIER

Scott J. Couturier is a Rhysling-nominated poet and prose writer of the weird, liminal, and darkly fantastic. His work has appeared in numerous venues, including The Audient Void, Spectral Realms, Tales from the Magician’s Skull, Space and Time Magazine, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and Weirdbook.

He is a copy and content editor for Mission Point Press, also working as an editor for the anthology series Weird Fiction Quarterly from Alien Sun Press. Currently, he lives an obscure reverie in the wilds of northern Michigan with his partner/live-in editor and two cats.

SCARLET

Redcap
Haunts border castles
And old battlefields, hat
Dyed scarlet by spilled blood,
Wicked and malignant goblin
Of ruddy eye and grisly leer.

Happy at misfortune,
Hungry for human gore—
Redcap, Redcap,
Shod in iron boots
And bearing pikestaff,
Cackles for joy
When men make war.

WINTER GNAWS

Winter gnaws at me:
Distorts frayed senses and
Warps my weary soul.

Gray becomes raiment:
In fire’s glow I see
Infinities of shadow.

Too warm, snow molten:
Mist rises in sullen specters,
Winter delivered dead.

In green I find decay:
In sullied clouds horrid faces.
Erase me, Winter, in your misery!

That I may not know sadness:
For despair of your change
Already from me has bled.

Winter gnaws at me:
I become my confinement,
Cinctured by declining mind.

Humors run to black mourning:
A hole in my heartache
Wide as any sidereal sky.

Bitterness brews to dregs:
Sinister mist caressing wrists
Not slit despite razor’s nearness.

And what is this emptiness:
This benighted wilding
Of wanton ways of life?

Winter! Biting into every core:
You stain skin with frost,
Blanch pith and bide in bones.

You I become: You I abhor.

THE DERELICT

Hulk of black metal adrift in space—
her plating scoured by alien suns,
weakest beacon of distress beaming
from her bridge (but no sign of life
besides). Shapely, like a vulturous bird,
with wings out-thrust to pierce
ether of a nameless planet’s atmosphere,
sphere of toiling hydrogen and helium
fraught with flaring lightning-burst.
Our ship—long away on a mining survey,
years spent in suspension tanks
as our vessel blank void traversed.
Now, limbs atrophied from long
disuse, roused by proximity to
this avian derelict of nether-space,
we stare at screens displaying
scan results: no living forms, but still
something there, an energy signature
unknown and aberrant, yet evident.

We board her with caution, lanterns
illuming zero-G frost of congealed
fuel, desiccated extraterrestrial remains
strewn throughout her hold. Horrors
happened here, archaic ichor smeared
on walls in cryptograms of evil cast,
corpses with monstrous toothy mouths
yawning evermore in torment aghast.
Lights flare along her sinuous length,
garish green-yellow luminance
revealing extent of butcheries past—
a wailing wells over ship’s intercom,
augmented via her voluptuous hull,
susurrus of voices summoning us
to offer ourselves up as sacrifice.
We feel her pain inside our brains—
need for a crew to helm her head,
to navigate her onward with foul intent
and spread perversion to entire worlds.

Our own ship detaches by her intent,
offcast like some unfit suckling babe.
Willessly we ascend to her bridge,
devious wires then plying at our nerves,
rousing perilous pain and delight alike.
A roar as her impious drive flares to
reinvigorated function, rings of
serrate metal spinning to summon
singularity: we help her by slitting
ourselves wide. Fresh blood stains her
deck, aeons dry of needed effluence—
suckling sounds as metal swells
and blushes a lurid crimson hue.
We key in new data for her course,
grins scissored ample by subtle blades
held on stalks of sadistic nano-bots.
Her need our need, her pleasure our pleasure,
wreck of far stars with a carnal greed
to inflict agonies exquisite, beyond mortal
measure: We laugh as she launches,
lustfully underway.