I go to the cops.
The enemy within me
Tells me to do so.
Do you have the time?
I’ve got a story to tell
About dead beauty.
I ask for a pen
And a big stack of paper.
I’ll write a report.
They get their report.
This night has a thousand eyes.
So let them have it.
I include weird signs
And bizarre incantations
In this new story.
I write until this
Chalice is empty. It’s done!
The Black Testament.
For all I know they
Hid my little black book somewhere
In a frozen ship…
I know it by heart,
So let me be your darkness.
Feel the poet’s pain.
Michelle Moroses (USA)
BLOOD SOUP
Michelle Moroses is an undergraduate student at Emerson College. She is on the management team for The Emerson Review and enjoys dogwatching and Wikipedia rabbit holes.
I’m making blood soup.
I’m letting a lot of blood out for it.
Enough to feed an army.
Here we are in the blue bathroom.
Cotton candy blue.
I will miss you when you leave me.
I’ll miss your oven mitts, your
garlic stained hands, your paring knife, the way you
separate skin from bone
the same way god must have separated man out from under his own flesh.
I will miss you even though you hurt me. This is the stupid thing, the part where the dinner guests you invited over get to clutch their full bellies and laugh. When they do, I will excuse myself to go out to the yard and beat the feeling back violently, with the biggest stick I can find.
It doesn’t work. It never works. My love is not so easily killed as my body could be. You wanted both of them, together, in a way you could consume. I’m afraid I’m not going to taste very good.
Nevertheless you want me, and I want you.
And I am fully clothed in the bathtub,
And the water has been shut off for days
yet the tub is filling up.
you’re making blood soup.
Michael Mulvihill (Ireland)
WRITER’S HEAD ON A STICK
Michael Mulvihill was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1978. He eventually, in his late teens, became a bookworm completing degrees up to the Master’s Level in Addiction Studies, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Social Sciences. His initial fictional work was surreal short stories of horror which have been featured numerously in Black Petals, an online horror science fiction zine. He branched out to write an apocalyptic, post-Soviet horror novel, Siberian Hellhole, which was translated and published in Georgia. His latest novel, Syriacide, features The Syrian War. He is an avid reader of history and is fascinated by world events, South Africa, the USSR, and the philosophical idea of a dystopian society. At the moment he is writing a dystopian novel. An avid martial artist and film buff, he trains constantly in Kenpo Karate and loves to also relax whilst watching films.
They used to shoot the messenger,
But this horde wanted gore,
A torture and a killing from the days of yore,
A piece were writ that had too much grit,
It told truth,
Stung a few living demons that wanted blood,
And thus was vowed there shall be blood,
Off went the writer’s hands thrown to starving dogs,
Plucked out of sockets went his pair of eyes,
Knee-capped by a shotgun as a chainsaw started on,
When all was done his body remains was fed to crocodiles in a zoo,
As this horde, this cult of death,
Raised their flag outside a mansion,
And placed the writer’s head on a stick,
A thick stick yes,
But none the less a stick,
The hurly-burly was done,
What was achieved in this?
Stephanie Ellis (England)
COMMUNION
Stephanie Ellis writes dark speculative prose and poetry and has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Her poetry has been published in the Horror Writers Association’s Poetry Showcase Volume 6 and her latest stories include Asylum of Shadows (Demain Publishing’s Short Sharp Shocks series), and Snowbooks industrial horror anthology, Thread of the Infinite. She is co-editor and contributor at The Infernal Clock and also co-editor of Trembling With Fear, HorrorTree.com’s online magazine. She is an affiliate member of the HWA.
