Category: Poetry

From the beginning the deck spoke

as if we were well enough acquainted.

We had no reason to withhold.

 

Shuffled till they must have lost

all reference, all relevance,

the same cards kept coming back.

 

Merging with the language of cards

was like merging with the language of words;

It was making a kind of poetry.

 

That thing was watching me;

I couldn’t sleep deeply

or something would seize me inside

 

and I’d never belong to myself again.

It still scratches at the windows from outside

 

Brian Jerrold Koester is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net Anthology nominee. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts and has been a freelance cellist.

The dolls only move

when you’re not looking.

They wait til deep

in the night.

 

I am an action

figure

as fragile as

a peppermint stick

and as easy

to dissolve.

 

The music box plays

Dark Eyes;

our bodies listen.

 

Who will get sick?

Who will go

matryoshka?

Who will steal blood?

 

The dolls talk.

The dolls choose me.

 

Under silk,

under velvet,

under satin,

their skin.

 

I only survive

by the luck

of the rising sun.

 

Brian Jerrold Koester is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net Anthology nominee. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts and has been a freelance cellist.

 

The sound of footsteps in the sound of footsteps.

Stop and listen. Nothing.

 

Start, they start; stop, they stop.

Strain to hear.          Where nobody goes

 

look over the shoulder

for what just ducked around the corner.

 

From the closet in the dark

breath on the back of the neck

 

a hint of a fang, a glint of a razor,

the enemy wearing the face in the mirror

 

Brian Jerrold Koester is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net Anthology nominee. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts and has been a freelance cellist.

 

The demon perched on the child’s chest

And whispered doom into his ear.

A shriek! then sobs and no more rest:

The demon perched on the child’s chest

In pitch dark. With a hellish zest

Now laughing, relishing the fear,

The demon perched on the child’s chest

And whispered doom into his ear.

 

Brian Jerrold Koester is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net Anthology nominee. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts and has been a freelance cellist.

The sweet song of the dead

as their hands hold shy flowers

to their nonexistent faces

 

I hand you a long rose

and you take it, scratch

your slender finger on a thorn

you touch it to my lips

and I hear

the sweet song of the dead

in the taste of your blood

 

Robert Beveridge makes noise and writes poetry in Akron, Ohio.

Shovelfuls of earth

thump, thump, thump

onto a coffin;

inside, frantic gasps

for the vestiges

of oxygen

rationed

by your

subterranean

prison.

 

So speak, shriek

scream, yell,

you will still be trapped

in a living hell

 

a l o n e

 

with only your bones

to bear witness.

 

Fern G. Z. Carr is a former lawyer, teacher and past President of both the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Project Literacy Kelowna Society.

“Ah my dear, have no fear,”

Snarled the stranger in the night,

Whose lupine eyes could mesmerize

Any creature in their sight;

“For I have only just returned

From my Transylvanian flight,

When I spied your classical beauty

By the full moon’s light,”

He whispered beguilingly,

Sharp teeth glistening bright.

Spellbound maiden hearkened to

This pallid stranger’s plight:

“As a count, it is not my custom

To be so forthright;

Although it is a pain in the neck,

I had to drop in for a bite.”

 

Fern G. Z. Carr is a former lawyer, teacher and past President of both the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Project Literacy Kelowna Society.

worms squirm

through eye sockets

and nasal cavities,

maggots

feast

on left-over strips

of putrefied flesh

hanging spaghetti-like

from the cranium

of a severed skull,

mandible agape

frozen in an eternal

muted scream –

a skull,

 

severed

 

from its former body

bound and found

in a different part

of the woods

 

Fern G. Z. Carr is a former lawyer, teacher and past President of both the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Project Literacy Kelowna Society.