My Mother's Ghost Started Dancing / Dracula Considers Writing a Memoir by LindaAnn LoSchiavo

My Mother’s Ghost Started Dancing

That year morphine became a minuet,
Sweet pianissimo. Its soft pedals stilled
Anguish, reproached relentless timekeeping —
Tick, tick — mortality’s metronome.

Before my mother died at home, she learned
That cancer’s like a Depression Era
Endurance contest: the dance marathon,
Odds stacked against her, swaying in slow mode.

Despite defiant hair, a plump physique
Deceiving guests, illness hokey-pokeyed
Her organs, shook breasts off, rhumbaed her cells,
Vitality an unremembered song,
Mere noise until sweet exhalations ceased.

Her corpse was wheeled away. The tempo changed.

Dynamic force reclaimed the rooms, infirm
No longer. Energy expressed intent
As if Mom were at a debutante’s ball,
Star of the floor show, sequined, applauded.

The mind’s embrasures, freed from pain’s embrace,
Seek entertainment, longing to erase
What’s real. Belonging to another realm —
Where everyone’s transparent — Mom’s got plans
She’s telepathed. But first she wants to dance.

A coldness sidles up to seize my hand.




Dracula Considers Writing a Memoir

His library contains expensive books,
Some autographed or leather-bound except
For his, whose memories are kept alive,
Poised on the empty dance floor of his mind.

The inkwell winks, inviting him to write
Without delay, lined paper his patient
Servant, recording wild deeds secretly.

Each season of the afterlife becomes
His outline, words like bones newly coffined.

Domestics unlock cobwebbed trunks, unpack
Undated mice-nipped letters, diaries,
Recalling sentences of women who
Kissed back, held hands, embraced in dark hallways,
Relationships creating lonelier
Nights after appetite had used them up.

Remorse nor pity rules his ragged realm,
Where he survives in sunless solitude.

Chapters completed, Dracula’s quill rests.

Indulging now in pleasure-crested pricks,
The Count reflects on boredom life-in-death
Inflicts on vampires. Had he known his fate,
He’d still prefer it to an early grave.

Native New Yorker. Poet. Writer. Dramatist. In 2024 LindaAnn LoSchiavo had three poetry books published in 3 different countries; two titles won multiple awards. 

In 2025-26 two titles are forthcoming: “Cancer Courts My Mother” and “Vampire Verses.”

BlueSky: @ghostlyverse.bsky.social

Part of the Beast by Brad Liening

from Part of the Beast

All these dead birds
What are we going to do with them all
Shovel them like snow to the edges of the parking lot
Great gray and brown feathery drifts
Spilling and feathering out again at the edges
Occasionally a cardinal like a splotch of bright blood
Among all the undifferentiated
Dead birds there’s so many
They ruffle and tumble in the wind
And there are fewer spaces now for parking
Where do we park among the dead birds
It used to be bees now it’s birds also maybe still bees
All these dead birds they weigh almost nothing
So why does my back hurt



from Part of the Beast

The latest invasive species isn’t so bad
Spiders the size of sedans
Webs big as apartment buildings
Like sharks they’ll eat the occasional person
But mostly it’s a case of mistaken identity
Mostly when we are drunk and surly
Throwing rocks
Enamored with our broken hearts
Lamenting a future we had failed to adequately imagine
Now it’s too late
There’s no getting rid of these spiders and in the sun
Their resting bodies look like dreams incarnated from brains
More gentle and loving than ours






Brad Liening is a poet living in Minneapolis and at bradliening.blogspot.com.

Survivor by Stephen N. Chaffee

a Madera Creek
hundreds-year-old juniper
tenaciously rooted in the rock
sports a mammoth trunk
limb stumps blunt the sky
naked as a savaged beast

suffered a thousand insults—
raging monsoon gully washers
tumbling elephant-sized boulders
incinerating lightning
woodcutters and miners
spray-painted graffiti
pocket knife tattoos:

Jeanne             BRI
 loves                 +
  Mika              DES

an extended middle finger
of moist cambium-rich bark
snakes skyward
to one green branchlet
tipping in the breeze

Stephen N. Chaffee's poetry has appeared in Deep Wild Journal: Writing from the Backcountry, Eunoia Review, Florence Poets' Society Review and several anthologies. His first book of poetry, The Arizona Trail: Passages in Poetry, was published by Wheatmark (2018). Stephen likes to "exhale routine / inhale wildness." He calls Arizona home.

Fingertips by Stephen Jarrell Williams

Simplicity is an illusion
just as words don't have enough blood
taking me down a low road
with summer heat on my sunburned back

remembering a poet from twenty years ago
quitting at his peak
whispering he was tired of writing
the same old words in reset sentences

recalling his familiar name
probably sick of his aliases
changing his clothes and shoes
to a long-haired hippie barefoot

swollen steps
into the ocean in Laguna Beach
polluted waves into the deep sand
outstretched fingertips to underwater graves.






Stephen Jarrell Williams loves to write in the middle of the night. His poetry and art can be found here and there. He's @papapoet on Twitter X.

October / Archetypes by Jason Ryberg

1) October (Tanka)

A Halloween wind
is moaning a low oboe
tone through October's
dark haunted forest of strange
     birds and boney xylophones.



2) Archetypes (Tanka)

The wind has always
    been able to read our minds
and the ten thousand
    myriad archetypes have
    their own memory palaces.

Jason Ryberg lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.

A Ghoulish Time for Fun by Fausto Avendaño

They rise at night from old tombstones
ghouls and skeletons with noisy bones.
They seek to scare children with horrid cries
showing their faces devoid of eyes.

They march down darkened streets
where many treats, boys and girls seek.
They tag along with little girls,
sizing up their little heads with pretty curls.

They search for naughty children, and their tricks,
those who splatter eggs on homes of bricks.
They throw tomatoes on houses’ sidings
and knock down signs with welcome writings.

On October thirty first crowds of ghosts
scramble out from their putrid posts.
They scare the little ones with their ghostly face,
stalking them in a frightening race.
As the children turn to run,
the specters chase them just for fun.

Some skeletons dance with grudging partners,
others conjure up their spells with devil sponsors.
All night the monsters frolic until late
dismissing their awful, gruesome fate.
They’re dead, they know, but they don’t care.
for all they want to do is scare.

But then they see far out on the horizon
The bluish light of dawn arising.

At once, a well-dressed specter from Paree
announces loudly “C’est fini!”
The time has come to stop all fun.
Back into their crypts the big and little monsters run.
Back into their yearlong slumber.
Until October comes around again.
They shout out this last refrain:
“Our night will soon be gone,
but we’ll be back, it won’t be long.”

Fausto Avendaño is a writer and an emeritus professor from Sacramento, California. He has published short stories and poetry in American and foreign journals, novels and a play. Fausto has won two literary prizes in the United States and abroad. Some of his books are featured on the Internet.

Black Poppy Open for Autumn Submissions

 

~ Have you got your ticket for Black Poppy Carnival?  Black Poppy is now open for submissions and will be posting works on September 1st (or whenever the first poem arrives).  Get your tickets ready for a new Autumn season of dreadful delights!