POETRY BY STEPHANIE SMITH

Stephanie Smith is a poet and writer from Scranton, Pennsylvania. In addition to The Horror Zine, her work has appeared in such publications as Carnage House, The Literary Hatchet, Raven Cage, Danse Macabre, Aphelion, The Chamber, and Illumen.

You can find her on facebook HERE

RESIDUE

Nothing stirs in this house but ghosts
A wisp of black smoke that comes and goes

We spend the days slaying demons
In this realm of light and shadow

Somewhere in between
Your hand has slipped away

Somewhere in the whiteness
There’s a powdery residue of you

Like childhood lost forever
Like the way we haunt ourselves at night

Fighting the undead in the dark

NIGHT TERRORS

I dreamed the darkness moved
Schizophrenic shadows held me in their arms
Nightmares roamed unleashed and searching for
skin to hide beneath

Somewhere monsters—with their sharpened teeth—
carved poetry into flesh
I trembled in my sleep
in an hallucinogenic pas de deux with Death
before we settled down for a game of chess

I wept at the beauty such terror invoked
The mystery which lay behind the curtain of night
I was a child again, fraught with fright and wonder
Longing for my mother in the ghost-lit darkness

GHOST

She welcomes us
at the graveyard gate:
an apparition composed of
clean, white linen
I inhale the incense
of her hair—
a poem I once heard
at a funeral
The kiss before the
casket closes

where I am left alone

THE QUIET HOURS

Demons whisper in the mist
sweet songs of ecstasy
Lullabies as slick as the grease the world was built upon

There was no big bang but a solemn collapse
An interruption in the middle of evening tea

As if midnight couldn't come soon enough
the darkness snuffs out the suffering light
and relieves it of its misery

Dreams drift across the room on shiny, ebon wings
Dreams as thin as air

I wonder where they go when morning comes
and the quiet hours cease to be

I wonder if nightmares become tangible things
and roam the tired landscapes
spreading contagion and disease

I wonder what it feels like to take one final breath
to be free to dance with angels at
the cliff where hope plunges to its death