Bowery Gothic

Poetry

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Wanderers

by Geoffrey O’Brien

With footfalls
on rock flake and feather glue
on crushed grass and reed slime
we make our way out of the lake world 

A reversed landscape
to which we woke in the dark
all signals lost
feeling for the path to the mooring cove

So connected we are
that even while alive
we already imagine
we have come back from the dead

 
 

Visitation

by Dayna Christensen

Out of a dream of teeth you return, neck snapping 
so fast it burns along the artery.  

Some familiar figure nictates in the dresser's shadow, 
gone the usual spaniel. Eyes like milk water.

He beckons like an old man, club-handed                                                 come come 
brushes your cheek with rough knuckles 

hot as asphalt. He is older
longer than he has been gone.

You go with. He stops mid-flight to pick at his hairline,
pulls candies and zip ties from his robe. 

Sunk in the black ocean at the bottom of the stairs
he is half anglerfish 

half father who
gripped the back of your jumper on the street.

He doesn’t want you to be afraid to meet.
Wants you to feel at home

with the berber squares unmoored on concrete, the dusty table saw
and claw hammer, boxes of belongings the shelves inherited, 

a grey safe room the size of his former closet
where suits pile in the corner like beached creatures. 

Orange carcasses enshrine a photo of your living mother. 
He has worried the edges to pieces.

Below it a suitcase, shimmering slick as oven air.
He lays his head against the wet nylon,

pats the rancid baggage, unzips it, eyes a-dew

                                                                                                       why haven’t you been to visit us?

 
 

Identity Theft

by Michael Brosnan

I was careful,
drinking levelly,
carrying on 

conversation, no longer
worried about earth-
quakes or ocean swells 

pulling everything back;
but this desire for ruin is
as single-minded as  

deer tick hunkered blind
on a narrow trail, hungering
for heat and the sweet  

succor of passing skin.
So I slide my seat in tight.
Behind the bar, the mirror 

reflects the backs of bottles
smooth and simple and blunt.
The people beside me,

they are smoking their
eyelashes down
to the tiniest nubs.

 
 

Ghostbusters

by Nick Daoust 

that almost-night     perversely white     watching
your piss ravine the bathroom wall           I thought
I heard a whisper     from the stall inside:
time moves in the shape of a heart

it said     two curves coming together     and what we did
in the broken highway half-
light     was beyond the pale     dark anachronisms
bite marks     loose glitter     everywhere

the city’s spectral mouths blinked open
to us     like history breaking its fever
sweating     eye to the glory hole     feeding the cold
finally     the truth turned our shirts to

the inside seams     outside     shaken
up in the cool eschaton     we counted the thunder-
claps with our own sounds     the lightning was
far away     but it still affected us     the past

flowered open like a valentine     the sky bore
a new covenant     the river thrummed a rapture     of white
fingers on the pier     and still our bodies     held like
spirits in a bottle     filling only the space we’d brokered them

 
 

Witch Kill Switch

by Betsy Guttmacher

Bright witch piping it in
Shrill witch’s twitching din
Whining whirring criticism
Dismissing simplistic witch
This witch I find in grinds
This witch I sink in shifts
Blind this witch with signs 
I mind this witch
I mind this thinking spirit
I this witch critic will fix this 
Will wig ‘til I hit with fists
This glib flirting witch 
Will kick this childish prig
Will dig will spit will spin tin
Will find its silk linings
Fill this witch in with ink
Lit I will sit sifting
Lit in this thinking kiln 
Binding my twisting mind 
Mining my divining spirit
Find my sin wiring
Find its wind-mist thrill
Sing this birth sing it right

 
 

Bewitched

by Betsy Guttmacher

when I was a girl
I wanted a peignoir
I dream of Jeanie 

Charlie’s Angles
all that hair
and always something 

translucent to wear
when opening the door
but even Samantha 

cigarette pants
blond and coifed
was waiting 

to break free
of her half hour time slot
and kill her parents 

lying between couch
and tv table
I wanted to know

how it worked
I wanted to know
how to arrange myself

while waiting
for my own body
hurtling through doorways 

into rooms then out
listening for cues
making a breathy entrance

oh hi

what is it
little girls
are afraid of 

being airborne
over the inevitable
collision of bodies

wondering
will it hurt
and for how long

wondering
will I like it and can I
hurt them back

 
 

What Trouble Looks Like

by Betsy Guttmacher

After she dared me to buy deodorant
but before mohawks and the Clash
we two carefree girls walked an inky
elm lined street, she destined to die
by suicide after shooting her boyfriend.
He’d trash her place, wreck her holiday
decorations, then survive. We did too
for a while, making our way home
from the Circle Cinema after spending
all our trolly money on Butterfingers
and popcorn. We walked and walked
working up the nerve to ring the bell
of a stranger’s home, giggling, twelve
and spooked. What did that couple see
to make them keep her outside, letting
in me, the shy one, to use their phone?
Didn’t matter, busy signal or no answer.
We navigated the dim streets, familiar
from parents’ car windows. A few years
later the doomed one wrapped herself
in a blanket, Pink Floyd on the turntable
and cried forever on her sofa. Her dad
ushered me in, then left shaking his head
I don’t know what’s wrong. Side by side
we sat, silent, flipping through The Best
of Life, lingering on photos of dead soldiers
their leathery skulls, their smoldering guns.

 
 

The Stroke

by Donna Kathryn Kelly

This is the scene where
my best friend’s mother
kneels behind the tailpipe
of a 1969 Mustang convertible
and breathes,
until she doesn’t. 

We had skated with her
at Roxy Wheels
not far from the Dundee Mall,
in the spring of our fifth-grade year:

each of us holding a soft hand,
spellbound by her dark blonde wings,
her thinness,
her smile.

The Kane County boys
were enraptured too,
leaning up against the rail,
watching her dappled movements,

as she led us around slick corners,
showing us
right over left,
coaxing,

See, you won’t fall.
Come with me.
Come with me.

 
 

Lines Written in the Dark

by David Pemberton

The map is a puddle.
The country is a puddle. 

Precarious is an understatement.
The thunder is not an understatement. 

What constitutes shelter in conditions like this?
What constitutes shelter in conditions like this: 

Lightning, thunder, the come-in hand gesture
made violently
the door on its hinges closes violently
behind the thunder that scared you inside
a friendly gesture
towards the fiendish shelter. 

To commemorate your arrival fresh flowers
are burnt and the smoke doesn’t smell like flowers. 

Look sharp, here comes the host
though it’s probably impossible to please the host. 

He has a dead wife.
He’s in love with his little dead wife. 

Accept the rule of exceptions
that flicker across your intentions. 

Please follow the butler
but don’t trigger the butler
and
don’t let that old gypsy bitch
bully you around like a bitch.
Oh, and don’t let the butler drink.

Your stay in this castle/mansion/house
will be another perfect example as to why people shouldn’t seek shelter in a strange
castle/mansion/house
but that’s not going to stop you
and that wouldn’t stop me.

To have any chance of saving yourself from what you fear
you’ll have to be able to describe what you fear
and hope someone believes you have a real reason to be scared. 

You may not have a vendetta
but you’ve walked into a vendetta
which is either something complicated spanning many generations
or just a simple vendetta against life
by which someone needs to kill. 

You think you are a do-gooder
but mayhem increases by the actions of a do-gooder
and the next thing you know you are a schmuck in over your head
and you’ve incited murder which is now on your head. 

It’s time for you to be uncommon
bold and to respond to the pleas of the tiny
voice calling through a closed door.
It’s time for you to be uncommon
and crack the night
like a flare
and illuminate this dramatic cul-de-sac of the night
with a thruway of the day.

 
 

Lines Written in the Dark II

by David Pemberton

Through all that grain and imperfection
I can still see goosebumps rising to your surface 

because you are afraid and turned on.
Repulsed and turned on. You have always loved   

violence, but you are so weak and turned on.
In this gothic cul-de-sac these titled    

aristocrats lead life cycles of darkness.
Aging in place, their vassals are absent.  

They are beholden only to costume
and ornament and being frightfully

turned on. Visions I see in the tarnish
of the silver. In this purple mass 

I’m horny with vision, flames and wax drips
tendrils of nothingness. This blue darkness.

This blue, blue darkness. A green spider, your hand.
I hope it’s not too late but it’s always too late.

My primary-colored sadism.
Your black masochism, paralyzing. 

Here we’ve come to define the relationship
as the space between the whip and the body.  

Don’t count on the count. Don’t count on the sun
that pitiful ember scared and scarcely  

penetrating a veiled expression
mournfully turned on.  All the flowers

are cut without origin. Syrupy
melodrama, dark centuries, white noise  

of the phantoms whistling through walls.
Whosoever can resist the sleep  

from this elixir can resist death. 
I, that obo, indecipherable  

and turned on. The shadows reek in the green
darkness. Gray matter. The laughter that echoes 

isn’t jovial.  As to the origin
of the sinister I suspect even  

myself. Deliriously mad and turned on.
Desecrated unctuously and turned off.

 
 

The Scientist

by Jen Herron

Lightning flashes, illuminating a workshop of filthy creation. Shelves are stacked with bell jars, specimens suspended in a viscous liquid: meniscus, iridescent jelly, fluorescent livers, brains in saline, kidneys coddled in formaldehyde. A copper vat bubbles, pops, spews a mist that hisses, spits like a cornered cat.

Amidst the instruments of life, a shrouded figure, his black feet sneak from a white sheet, toenails glint like broken glass under the sickly glow of a yellow moon.

She walks towards the writing desk, pushes pen aside, searches the drawers. A crinkled fist of parchment, his last poem, Adonias, hides the heart that refused to burn.

The desiccated chest is open, awaits the infamous relic; two loves joined at last. Ventricle, valves and arteries stitched in; hours of needlepoint well-spent. 

A galvanised surge will see him back. Tremulous fingers feel the lever, wrangle her into second-guessing. Was this the heart that loved her? (Yet shared a kiss with a sister, pushed a wife—or two— into the abyss).

The perpetual heart plucked from a pyre. What good this morbid gesture in the solitary sail through life? She beheld her man complete, flipped the switch—the indestructible organ, now pleasantly black and crisp.

 
 

The Mourning Garden

by Diane Butner

The last minute of their marriage
he appeared.
Less for Art’s sake than for keeping.
Shaped from dust, ashen grey
Weighty but with no depth.
Striking a frozen pose near the gazebo 

Brooding and tragically stuck.
His face holds no color.
Stone deaf. Cracked dull eyes,
Once filled with promises,
Crying summer anemones.
He watches the hours with blankness. 

Crape Myrtle rotting-
Roots twist and knot 
Over a divine chisel, kissed
by silk moths.
He was her Eros.
Death scent burns dark.

Patchouli and Musk.
She walks the pathway through
her empty grove
of spoilt memories.
Each day she visits her odious choice.
From sculptress to wife

to widow.
Turned her lover to stone-
Keeps his jellied heart
from wandering.
Sealed safe inside
her apothecary jar.

 
 

The Ghosts of Downed Trees

by William Doreski

The ghosts of downed trees wander
for miles, looking to re-root.
Waving misty, weightless boughs, 

they press against greenhouses
where tropical fruit defy winter
and pearly flowers dangle and gloat. 

We’ve often felt the fragile spirits
of those trees as we walk in the woods.
We’ve also prowled the greenhouses 

at the famous college where women
revise themselves into figures
of capable imagination. 

Few tourists browsing for orchids
today, mid-week in February
with a windstorm plotting to fell

more hapless trees and free them
from their earthly sphere to roam
wherever they envision themselves.

The frustration of the ghost trees
reminds everyone that we’re clinging
to the slope of a cosmic funnel. 

The women of the college sense
the tree-spirits brushing against them
as they stride to class to claim

their place in the one great intellect.
We were never that young. Only
recently have we sensed the trees

shuffling through a fourth dimension
like hanks of hair still growing
decades after the body has died.

 
 

Trees towering like all that’s unsaid

by Robin Seiler

 
 

Summer harvest

by Robin Seiler

Blackberries, plump and dark, fall off
the bush at a touch. Apricots hang
heavy on branches. Tomatoes,
sweet and small, burst open
in the mouth. A zucchini, overlooked
under a leaf, grows bigger
and bigger still. The lemon tree,
overladen, lets lemons fall,
pile up, soften brown, and sink
into the earth down to where
the chickens are buried,
the ones I named.