By Grá Saol The Crackling is instilled in effect. Only quieting at full throttle, When all apprehensive attitudes are made null and void.   The Glass refracts glimpses of an Organic green. Slowly cut off by the ever moving Mechanism I’m confined to.   I am not alone on this journey. In front of me lie 50 or so people, All are waiting to depart the vessel. None intrigued by the other's journey.   The river sparkles brown and blue. I’d have rather been left off there, But that

By BV Lawson You watch the bird fly overhead and think it had a name once. It soars so beautifully and comes down to land in front of that woman right over there. You wish you knew who she was.   You think she had a name once.   The sun-colored flowers blow back and forth in the wind, and you reach down to touch one. Smooth, soft, fragile.   Did you grow them once?   This garden seems so strange yet so familiar, and the house, the sun-colored house, you think you know it.   Y

By Corridors of sleep Black flowers Grow wild From inside the Decaying memory   Just another gift That you gave me   I am the anomaly The pointless apology The heartfelt liturgy After the tragedy   The softest kiss Just Before surgery   Before the angels in white Come to take me And Put their hands Deep inside me   Milena If I don’t wake up You will know exactly Where to find me   #DarkPoetsClub

By Aidan Ashton in the deepening grey of a solitary winter the house waits by the water holding us within its teeth. it is a cruelty to call it a house; it is a hulking shadow torn from bones of the world and forced into the falsehood of a home; slate excised from fractured mountains; beams dragged from mutilated forests; all laid to rest beside the drowning darkness of the lake. it is not meant for us. the wilderness lingers still within its halls like the scent of blood on

By Salem Youngblood I slit my skin to keep myself alive. Pain was a promise. The blade, a language.  Every slash a prayer that said, I am here. I am here.  The metal became fluent when my tongue failed. Its whisper  held my trembling hands. Its sting reminded me  that I had not yet faded away.    At first, it was only blood—  that faithful flood, warm and certain.  But then, petals. Pale and trembling.  Blooming through the red, as if grief could flower. They smelled faintly

By Rosa Christian Do you ever ponder the evil things                                           we see on the tele, hear on the radio? Recoil from the horror image they bring declare, self-righteously, 'I could never do that.'?   Couldn't you? Are you really sure? Look inside au fond primitive instincts endure foul things hide on the haunted, oozing floor of a darkling well we keep hid from luminance our own private hell.   Where animal essence still rules supreme impulse crie

By Rhian Elizabeth when i was a child my sleepwalking was an almost nightly occurrence. my mother would find me standing on the bottom step of our garden, a little lost ghost in a nightgown, paper thin against the elements on those welsh valleys nights. then there was the time she caught me pissing in the living room plant pot, the time i toppled books and shelves and chairs during a rare stay with my older brother in his fancy windsor apartment, and i was once rescued by a n

By Virginie Bernard You betrayed me, made me a nomad Lied to my face, for more than a year Stole from me, money I never had All to pretend we were both clean Just before my gut-wrenching departure I needed to shock your sedated routine I ran through my memories to capture The one you still care about, our everything I wanted you to find her stabbed on the floor Figure out what to do with her lifeless body Lonely, burdened, yet selfish when you score But she came closer, eye t

By S.D Gould I was hungover the day of your funeral. And so many after that. Grief came in bottles, and left in apologies I never sent. They said the service was beautiful— I don’t remember the lilies or the suits, the priest reciting a name that no longer sounded like yours. I’m sure I mouthed along, tasting the syllables like ash. When they lowered you down, the world didn’t break. That offended me. The sun was obscene in its persistence. The sky had the audacity to stay bl

By Sharon Marie Hier The forest shows its truest face only after the sun abandons it— when the last streak of gold dissolves and the earth exhales its deeper, older breath. In that hour, the wildness wakes. Not the soft, green gentleness of day, but the feral heart beneath it: roots twisted like clenched fists, brambles sharpened into threats, and the night creatures stepping out of their hunger. The darkness here is not empty. It roars. It sings. Its beauty is carved from to

By Megan Cartwright Broken blood vessel blooms, sprouts in tendrils that snake across my eyeball; a white orb moon. I drive nameless roads, consumed by history, shed rust, flakes of a broken blood vessel’s bloom. Map lines spread like veins, plumes beating blue with the heart’s pace, rapid beneath the white orb moon while the cigarette lighter socket looms at the edge of my vision, aches red; blur of blood vessels in bloom, mind and mouth of cotton wool. I exhale dragon’s bre

By Tay Ann I sink my teeth into her neck, wait to taste the copper on my tongue. I taste every compliment she gives, the prayers she sends, the back she bends.   I take it all from her, watch as it drains from her veins, as her skin turns pale and cold. I make her look as cruel as me, even as I take it all in.   There is only so much one can take, before it numbs them to the pain. I cannot stop. Even when I know it's gone on too long. I feel   the end is near. She's almost em

By Roxana Shirazi It’s the mustard gas that has made me The way I am, my love. No garlic, mustard or horseradish smell, I got seduced by the odourless pure type, It’s not my fault. It’s the days of sitting in the honey silence With cherry-patterned skirts cuddling my little knees Waiting for all the boys to notice me that has made me The way I am, my friend. Yperite bleeding through the Persian dusk. Contaminating/poisoning/dirtying. It’s the bad uncle holding my five year ol

By Mara Adamitz Scrupe I see myself as seductress                      believer ( dulcius ex asperis ) in the rush of hope & hardship toward the tide of sweet license             I am purposeful: a seeker a daughter of an earthly epoch (& an eyeblink away from the next) a siren of desire in proximity to virtue (though evidently not close enough) I may be an archetype or a means to an end (in a quagmire of uncertainty                I wonder at the clarity of the upright ringe

By Savannah Smyth She lay on the slab, White sheets hitched up like a skirt, One red eye, pink as the morning, Interlocked with mine as I wiped the pus from her petticoat. When I asked why she was naked, Chest bare, chest broken- he said ‘The dead have a funny way of flirting.’   I averted my gaze as I plunged my fingers into her chest, Rooted around in ruby until I found it- With her beaten heart in my hands I wondered, How carelessly others had held it before me. Spotted wi

By Zhengyang Tang To flee, or to look, or only to listen? Baku, its nose curling round the iron cage. From afar, a shrillness thick with ears, noses, and throats.   Like the smile you choose for New Year, corners of your mouth grow ever more dazzling. Flesh-zippers split open long, pale torsos, the knives jerking, spewing waves of reek and brine—in the air, red water worms’ carnival.   Breathe now; loosen your billions of warm, damp alveoli. May you have eyes ringed like Satu

By Sean Patrick Mulroy He wasn’t in the car— not even in the trunk— and when I looked inside the kitchen cabinets there wasn’t anything but rat poison and cereal. I searched the closet twice, turned out the pockets of your pants, and ran my hands between your winter coats. I could have sworn I saw him cowering beneath your desk— but no. I thought he might be outside watching through the window, so I pulled the curtains down and then I pulled the carpet up

By Malcolm Drysdale Humans equipped lacking existence wait patiently for the miracle promised for themselves to happen Brothers sisters fathers mothers Uncertain in this age of reason The TV flickers in the ante natal ward as if in warning of life to come Yielding to misgivings the future too appears in spasm as nature strives for birth each morning Cutting across this valley side I caught my thoughts from falling Only the sea ahead after all the shoreline adept at change The

By Marina Bell I want us to crawl out of the fire and rubble and ashes of this Through the portal of past and could be-s. into each others’ beds. slime and silt and rotting leaves   into the gloaming.   cracked teeth jagged bone, gushing red ground black Glorious gore thrashing my bloody heart into a void that has no song too hollow for ghosts too empty for an echo.   The ecstasy of this violence rearranging my organs. Riving muscles into new shapes.   I want to sway to the w

By Louise Moises I discover a small green object on my driveway— at first, I think it a leaf. On closer inspection, I find the lifeless body of a hummingbird, his little wings folded, looking as if he has worn out, closed his eyes, fell asleep.   I cradle the tiny body in my palm, stroke the feathers of the breast— soft, very, very soft. On this bright, unseasonably sunny day, hush of winter overwhelms me— I think of my husband folding his arms around his fading