Requiem for a Childhood Home / Braille Image by Laura Stringfellow

Requiem for a Childhood Home

House on a hill of thorns, columns of ash.
Inside, a carpet of crushed roses
attempts its blossoming. The back
yard is sharp with hair of palmetto,
brittle from the sun. Thistles

slide along the edge of the house,
brackish with grief. There are splinters
in the yard, I believe, which assemble
themselves into bones, even as shadows
disappear and the land

darkens. It’s all a dream
under which the cloud of reason
is shaken, broken to bits. Shattered—
like a mirror that tries too hard to see.

A woman strokes the remnants
of a dismembered photograph, the roots
of my mother's hand disheveling time,
alchemies of earth grown rough by wind.


* Previously published in the Summer 2021 Issue of Déraciné

Braille Image

I am my sad dream walking
the blind. Their hands and arms
vanish. At dawn, they disappear
down the dark road, scattering
mud from tattered shoes.

The blind belong to the roses
and the fields
which, cruelly, they cannot see.

In my waking, they think
nightmares. Without feet,
without maps, the eyes
of the swirling invisible storms
of their fingertips do see.

With our hands, we only touch.

Nightly, I dream for them
these blooming things--
the opening red anemones of hearts,
burgundy buds of tongues into roses,
rising continents of azaleas in spring.

Laura Stringfellow writes both verse and prose poetry, holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry, and hails from the muggy strangelands of the Southern U.S. Her work has appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including Déraciné, FERAL, Right Hand Pointing, and Coffin Bell: a journal of dark literature.

Ghostweaving by Laura Stringfellow

In winter,
in the reflection of the window,

she would see herself rise,
would see herself lift,
a faint outline, a haze

that has drawn light
into itself. She would
whisper to the ghost,

spill words into the ether,
pour them like a waterfall.

Spin them until they entered each other.

She spoke chants over the invisible
lungs, over the mouth.
Stirred them with the wind.

They both begin to awaken.

Laura Stringfellow writes both verse and prose poetry and hails from the muggy strangelands of the Southern U.S. Her work has appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including Right Hand Pointing, Déraciné, Neologism Poetry Journal, Ephemeral Elegies, and Coffin Bell: a journal of dark literature.  

Moon House by Laura Stringfellow

The room is a plastered eggshell.
Canopy and curtain, white as ash,
blanch with regret. The carpet swells,
an ocean of red, greedy with its own
making, while the mirror stares blankly
at the wall in pity.

The little girl thinks of the ghost
down the hall, the carpet the color
of berries to the point of rotting.
She dreams albinos, white lashes,
a small drop the color of garnet.
Sap of cut alder.

She thinks that the sea swells under her,
that she is the moon rising.

Laura Stringfellow writes both verse and prose poetry and hails from the muggy strangelands of the Southern US. Her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in the US, UK, and Ireland, including Coffin Bell: a journal of dark literature, Déraciné, Right Hand Pointing, Ephemeral Elegies, and The Lake.

Mirage by Laura Stringfellow

Freud would have called it wish.

Or fulfillment. Damp. A moving

forest the color of emerald. My god

mother slicing the lake with the thin

nose of a canoe as smoothly as she

cuts through the lining of chocolate cake.

Her name is Virginia — which, in dream,

as in life, appears geographically

and symbolically significant. An eye

of sapphire floats at the edge of the lake,

tapping as a finger might on glass.

My mother, next to me, seems to emit

something like the tears of angels or devas.

When ghosts whisper, I hear my mother say

in her southern drawl, they speak mist.

I think of them traveling over rivers.

But, she insists, they can't cross water.

A luna moth flies from her mouth

and dissolves into a moon's disc

in Dali-like metamorphosis.

For some reason, it makes me think

of the Morpho butterfly, the iridescent scales

of its wings unfolding into a fan of azure.

Laura Stringfellow writes both verse and prose poetry, holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and hails from the muggy strangelands of the Southern U.S. Recent publications have appeared in various journals including Déraciné, Eunoia Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Thirteen Myna Birds.