POETRY BY CHRIS McAULEY

Chris McAuley is a best-selling, award-winning, New York Times Best-selling writer who is most famous for creating the popular StokerVerse franchise with Dacre Stoker (Bram Stoker’s great grand-nephew).This continuation of Bram’s work has proliferated from graphic novels, books, audio dramas, table-top games into the world of television and film. He has also created a successful science fiction franchise with Hollywood actress Claudia Christian (star of Babylon 5) called Dark Legacies.

Chris has recently been nominated for the highest award for writing in tabletop games—The Ennies for his Three Musketeers vs Chthulu RPG which has also become a comic book series. He is also known for his work on Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Terminator franchises. Away from writing duties he is the co-owner of X-G3 Productions, a film company spearheaded by CNN’s George J Giakoumis and Peter S Gialoumis as well as a multiple award-winning Executive Producer on The Stranded Warrior Sci-Fi film.

THE MAN IN MY FATHER’S SKIN

When he drank,
he became a hollow thing.

Same face,
But his eyes went backwards
Almost like he was watching from behind a mask.

He called me boy
like it was a curse.
His belt made shapes
I still trace in the mirror.

Mom said it was the bottle.
I say it was something older
A darkness that wore his voice
like a stolen coat.

He died when I was twenty.
But sometimes,
I hear my voice rise,
And I know the demon has my throat now.

INVASION

It doesn’t knock,
doesn’t whisper before breaking the lock.
It crashes through bone and breath,
spilling old shadows into the light.
I am not here.
Not now.
Not in the skin I have grown to fit.
I am where the walls wept,
where time ripped open,
where the air tasted of iron and static.
It starts as a whisper.
A flicker of sound.
Something small, insignificant—
a scent, a voice, a sudden slam of a door.
Then it is the whole world.
A tunnel collapsing inward,
suffocating the air from my lungs,
pulling me backward.
I am in two places at once,
but the past has sharper teeth.
I swallow the present like glass,
each shard a protest against the past,
but it seeps in,
dripping between the cracks of my ribs.

THE GRIEF THAT CAME HOME

It did not end with the funeral,
Though the earth was kind enough to close.
Nor with the silence of your room,
The bed made, your slippers untouched,
The air still holding your scent like a trap.
Grief did not knock.
It seeped.
Through the keyhole.
Through the marrow.
Through the spaces in words I could no longer say.
At first, it wore your face.
Soft. Familiar.
It sat in your chair and hummed your songs
Out of tune,
Out of time.
But grief is greedy.
It twisted your smile
into a rictus of accusation.
It walked like you but in a backward way,
It's limbs jerking
Like a broken puppet pulled by regret.
At night,
It lies beside me,
Cold as the dirt that cradles you.
It does not sleep.
It watches.
And sometimes it speaks
But not in your voice,
In the sound of the monitor flatlining,
The click of the clock I stared at
As you slipped away.
I tried to bury it.
I lit candles. Burned photos.
Took pills. Dug holes.
But the thing about grief is
It doesn’t die.
It just learns
How to live with you.