Author Archives: ebwrite2014

The Bittersweet Incense of Their Shadowed Evenings

All is not well, is never well
At Twicetold Abbey.

The wind, a lost child on the moor.
The moon, a patriarch’s death mask.

There seems to be
A wolf howling competition.

Lady Abernathy writhes in her sheets
In a bedroom dark with foreshadows.

She long ago decided
On a sort of permanent hysteria.

Her husband tears out his hair again
At his bloodstained desk.

Each person’s dialogue hangs in the air,
Awaiting the fated punctuation.

A handsome stranger keeps arriving,
Vowing to rescue them all.

He disappears over and over
In the same nightly hailstorm.

And yet, repeatedly trapped in their rooms,
Each smiles in secret.

To know exactly why they are here to happen,
How they will be allowed to end.

(First published in Bowery Gothic No. 8, Summer 2023 – thanks to the editors)

Neighborhood

The world where I live is in slow secret.
The old bird feeder, forever hanging,
Lies on the ground. Its branch is gone.
The fallen leaves from the nearby oak tree
Creep by inches to the back fence.
The sun sneaks near the horizon all day.

A new boy seems to have arrived by himself
In a house sold in haste a few doors down.
He never wears a shirt, runs instead of walks.
The other children have agreed to his rule,
Cheerfully doing the most dangerous things.
New screams fills the air.

A lot, leveled at the top of the hill,
The house erased. No memory
Of what it looked like, who lived there.
Dogs I have never seen before snarl and snap.
All these polite strangers – names of confusion,
Lives of utter mystery.

Is it my time to move somewhere,
Be the question mark –
The one whom no one has seen before,
Who changes how their days happen.
Suddenly inhabiting the scoured hill
Where something was they can’t remember.

(First published in Nightingale & Sparrow #18, Spring 2023. Thanks to editor Juliette Sebock.)

The Fellow in the Bright Nightgown

W.C. Fields called death “the fellow in the bright nightgown.”
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

For years it hung inside out on the bathroom doorknob,
Empty sleeves a-droop, tight frilly collar,
That absurd songbird pattern.
Sometimes it lit up the house like a lamp.

No one confessed to buying it. That ugly thing?
And no wearing it: the repeated birds pressed on your eyes
Like anxious hands. A shame. It seemed made for no one.
We forgot about it over and over.

And then one night: that hairless naked stranger in the hall.
He pulled it on, inside out first. It seemed wrong to laugh.
He shook it down over himself,

We gazed up helpless at its billowing glow,
Descending like a parachute lit from within.
We felt the nothing of its perfect fit.

(First published in Crosswinds Poetry Journal Vol. 9, 2023. Thanks to the editors.)