Ghosts

All posts tagged Ghosts

Trigger warning: description and images of medical procedures, body trauma, and really long obligatory “recap” before I can start adding new content to this blog after such a lenghty hiatus

So, uh. Hi,

It’s been a while.

Meta me, AWP 2018
Tampa, Florida

Halloween is the witch’s New Year, so what better time for a reflection on what’s been going on since this writing blog went quiet?

Where I’ve been:

In my mind, it’s still 2018. Like, honestly, I blinked and woke up an old lady in the apocalypse. (True and also not true. I’ve also lived a hundred years since then, and I felt every minute of it).

2018 was and still is the highlight of my professional life as a writer. Just that year I’d won a creative writing fellowship from my home state of Delaware after multiple previous honorable mentions. A novelette I wrote had recently appeared in a major genre magazine and I was featured as an “industry outsider” in a writing craft mag, both available on the shelves of our local B&N. I released my first full-length book of poetry in collaboration with a noted poet and editor in my field, still floating on the high of my award-winning debut chapbook. I used part of my award money to attend my first AWP Conference as a representative of my own online literary journal, Riddled with Arrows, and I served on the executive board of an international organization of speculative poets, bosom buddies or at least a first-name-basis with some of the best genre writers in the world. I headlined a writing contest for the Philadelphia Writing Conference, got paid to run writing and poetry workshops on topics of my design in my home town, and I performed in museums and literary events throughout Delaware–all while battling a progressively debilitating mystery illness.

(My beloved grandmother died in December 2018. So did my 19-year-old cat.)

Me at the Art & Book Fair in Hockessin, Delaware with my “literal” last spoon (courtesy William Hahn, background)

Immediately after my final appearance in early January 2019, I collapsed. By that point I had been sick for at least ten years–I trace my symptoms either to the traumatic birth of my son in 2006 (the beginning of my migraines) or to chasing after him in 2008 (the year the daily icy phantom headache set in). After years of bouncing between specialists I’d settled for calling it “chronic daily migraine”, which for a long time I managed with painkillers and grit. But I’d burned off the last of my energy to complete my fellowship year, and now I found myself with nothing left to live my life.

(I honestly thought I would die before they figured out what was wrong with me.)

I’d started losing my vision that summer. Everything outside of a few feet was blurry, and light hurt my eyes. I saw half a dozen eye doctors who all said my prescription hadn’t changed because if I squinted and concentrated I could just make out the letters on the chart. I found a surgeon who said I had cataracts that weren’t “ripe” yet, though he’d be happy to remove them for me, just as the EN&T surgeon had been happy to cut into my sinuses twice before shrugging my symptoms off as allergies.

I took to wearing sunglasses indoors, and ear plugs in my ears to stop the painful reverberations from the slightest sound. I had ringing in my ears as well, and a constant dragging sensation deep in my ear canal and throughout the right side of my skull. I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t form words without thinking about it first, and kept saying the wrong thing anyway. I’d been using a cane for months to help with balance and numbness and fatigue, but now I couldn’t walk without holding on to walls. I had a two kids and a thirteen year-old migraine. All I wanted to do was lie down.

Inforgraphic from https://spinalcsfleak.org

In the February of 2019, after asking my neurologist for one last Hail-Mary MRI, I finally got my diagnosis—one that I had floated myself about five years earlier. It’s called Spontaneous Intrancranial Hypotension (SIH), though in my case there was nothing spontaneous about it. At some point a long time ago I developed a fistula between a vein and my spinal dura, or maybe a tear in the dura that over time became a fistula; in either case it meant that the reason I’d had all these mounting neurological symptoms was because for years I’ve been dumping spinal fluid into my bloodstream—a leaky tap causing my brain to sink lower in my skull. It had gone unnoticed for so long because the body learns to ramp up cerebral fluid to compensate, but as I had demonstrated in my own life, you can only get away with a system like that for so long.

When I got the news that the imaging had finally caught up to what I’d been saying for years, I literally fell to my knees in relief. Not only was my doctor suddenly one hundred percent on my side, he was elated, because, as far as he knew, this was something fixable.

Only it wasn’t.

What I didn’t know was that my positive imaging was just a ticket to the front of a very long line of the world’s spinal leak patients. Positive imaging only means they start treating you less like a drug-seeking hypochondriac now that you can prove you’re not making it up.

Sorry not sorry. #EndPKD

The kind of spinal leak I have is not the kind most people are familiar with, including the vast majority of healthcare workers I’ve encountered, including my own surgeons. If you pop a leak from an epidural or a car accident or something like that, in most cases all it takes is a (relatively) minor procedure called a blood patch to seal the wound—not unlike patching a hole in a tire.  A lot of times they don’t even have to know where the tear is, especially in an otherwise healthy and “normal” person; in theory the blood migrates to the hole and, as it clots, it seals.

But I am not a normal person. I have polycystic kidney disease, a genetic condition not just of the kidneys but of the connective tissue, which effects all of the body’s structural systems—like the spinal dura.

We are only just learning how widespread and insidious PKD is, just as medical science has only recently developed the imaging technology to track minute spinal leaks. There are only a handful of clinics around the world that specialize in diagnosing and treating them, and each of these sees thousands of patients every year, while every year the number of new entries on the spinal leak forums I follow grows exponentially with people desperate for a diagnosis. A system like this creates a bottleneck, with the few providers struggling to keep up with the glut of need, and a backlog of patients being under-treated or denied any treatment at all.

In amongst these are the zebras—patients like me with rare disorders that make us more likely to suffer spinal leak, and less likely to be fixed.

A kiss for mom after sugery #1
August 2019

In spring of 2019 I travelled to North Carolina for my first DSM at Duke University, home to one of the few spinal fluid leak clinics in the world. They diagnosed the fistula and I had my first surgery that summer.

First scar, Summer 2019
Me and my cane before surgery #3 at the La Brae Tar Pits Museum, Los Angeles, CA
March 2020

(Two days later, my mother died of polycystic kidney disease.)

I didn’t get better.

That November I had new DSMs and surgery #2 in Los Angeles, with one of the original leading specialists in the field, where they determined that surgery #1 had fixed the fistula but sprung a new leak. They patched the leak and sent me home again.

For a very brief time I had some improvement, and for one night–one glorious family dinner at Red Robin–I felt like my old self again, with a healthy brain and an unspeakable feeling of joy to be alive. But then I went into high-pressure, which is a thing that can happen when a leak is sealed but the body has gotten used to producing mad amounts of spinal fluid to compensate. The longer the active leak, the greater the risk of high pressure.

My patch blew after a few weeks, and by Christmas I was sick again.

(That December my surviving brother was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, which had already spread throughout his body and into his brain.)

In March 2020, after surgery #3 I flew home from Los Angeles two days before the world went into Covid-19 lockdown. Within a few weeks it was clear the latest patch had failed; only this time instead of getting better, I got worse. By May 2020 I was effectively bedbound. Outside of short trips to the bathroom and sitting up for meals, I’ve been living on my back ever since.

I was afraid to travel for yet another round of imaging and surgery without a vaccine, so we stayed home. Between my disease and the raging virus I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it.

But I did.

I call this one “Earth Mother in situ”
Fall 2020

In the year of lockdown my kids went to school online, my six-year-old daughter right next to me in the bedroom where I live, every day, my son logging in to his first year of high school from within the dark funk of his lair down the hall. My husband, an #essential employee, made himself #irreplaceable at his manufacturing firm so we could keep up the co-pays on all my medical bills; in the evenings he took his parenting shift and still brought me dinner to order. In short, 2020 was the most difficult year we’ve ever had to endure as a family, as I’m sure it was with yours.

Thanks to the internet gods for Zoom, though, am I right?

Thrilled to be back in LA. Again.
June, 2021


Finally in June 2021, Tom and I flew back to LA for a third time—fully vaccinated!— for that long-anticipated new go-round of DSMs. It was an epic (and very expensive) journey involving a wheel-chair that reclines 180 degrees, four private vans, four very special planes equipped with lie-back seats, and one very heroic husband, but sadly it did not end in a successful imaging of my current leak.

In August I had a multi-level blood patch at a hospital in Philadelphia that targeted some suspicious masses of cysts along my spine. Earlier this October my latest MRI confirmed that this procedure also failed, which I knew.

And that’s where I am.

Writing about writing:

During all of this I hardly did any writing at all. Tom built me a folding “lap desk” that I can use lying down, but I had a hard time stringing words together when I could barely read the words on my screen. I tried to stay active in forums, but that was hard on my brain, too. I couldn’t remember words, couldn’t focus, couldn’t even stay awake sometimes while looking at the page. But I had a lot of time on my hands.

In 2020 I read “The Beginning of Everything” by Andrea Buchanan, a memoir by a musician who re-trained herself to play piano after enduring a spinal leak. She had a lot of things going for, including a doctor ex-husband and an otherwise normal dura, and she got better after only like a year, while I was in year twelve to fourteen (depending on where you start the count)—but still. She writes beautifully of what it’s like to be in a broken brain, she gave me hope, and she helped shed light on our sorry little unknown corner of the healthcare landscape. Plus, I took piano lessons for like thirteen years and I’d be hard pressed to play “Heart & Soul” for you today, brain damage or otherwise; so I figured if Andrea can teach her brain to be a pianist again, then I can retrain mine to write a novel.

So I did.

Or, I am. It’s a work in progress.

The brain damage thing is still a big problem. My vision comes and goes, my headache never does, and I’m tired a lot. I have a tendancy to type homophones or to juxtapose the letters and sounds of words I’m holding in my head. I never suffered ADD but I now I lose my train of thought all the time and often find myself zoning out while staring at the page. I have compiled several books worth of material on various projects in the last few years, but I’m a loooong way from finishing any one of them. I’m having a hard time in particular connecting the dots of my current fiction WIP, which is a very ambitious and hugely complicated and would have been a major challenge if I had all my pre-leak capacities. As I am, it’s more like a big Fuck You to the looming specter of my mortality.

But I’m invested. I can still be a writer with brain damage. I can be a writer who lives in a bed. I just need some novel supports to help me get there.

Hence this blog.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that it could be helpful to have a place to:

—organize my thoughts

The tragic poet in Victorian nightdress, 2021

—articulate, to address, to write to; a real or even imagined audience, rather than the echo chamber of my own broken head

— counteract the dreadful loneliness and isolation of writing, in the absence of the real-world, real-time connections that I miss

—to chronicle what this is like, writing with brain damage from a (yet)un-fixable spinal leak; particularly in the event that the worst should happen and I don’t manage to meet my writing goals before I either lose my mental capacities or die from stroke or something like poetically tragic that. Cuz it just doesn’t feel right that I should work this hard just to have it all disappear with my hard drive someday. The world should at least know I tried

—(vent. This is hard, y’all, and my heart is full of ghosts.)

But I’ve been putting it off, partly because all the plug-ins need updating and regular maintenance and the whole thing needs a do-over which is just, you know, A LOT for a broken brain. But I did get around to some basic housekeeping, and the rest can be done in good time, so I can’t use that as an excuse anymore.

I was also waiting until I heard back from the surgeon’s team in LA, since I was finally able to get a copy of my latest MRI into the mail and they were due to get back to me a week ago. I had set that conversation up in my mind to be “it”, the end of this miserable chapter of just WAITING, the official beginning of the next part where I know. But in keeping with the pattern, I’m still stuck waiting, this time for the surgeon in LA to confer with the radiologist in Philly, after which (presumably) one or the other will contact me with suggestions for what to do next, I guess.

Whatever it is, I’m tired of holding my breath while I wait to find out if I’m ever going to get better. Doctors are not made better people for wielding that kind of power. There’s always a gaff, a dropped appointment, an insurance loop hole, a golf game, a long holiday weekend between me and that desperately-awaited return call, that all-important word. Always one more thing between me and the rest of my life. After this last go-round I promised myself I’d stop living on hold while I wait for it, even if I have to live it permanently in this broken body.

I guess what I’m saying is, there’s really no reason to keep putting this off. Halloween is, after all, a time for crossing over. So.

Hello, and happy new year.

Shannon Connor Winward
October 31, 2021

A Plague of Shadows is the latest fiction collection put out by The Written Remains Writers Guild, my hometown writing tribe, in cooperation with Smart Rhino Publications.  By design, all of the stories in PoS feature both haunted places and haunted people—basically ghost stories on steroids. My post-apocalyptic “To Heart’s Content” appears in this anthology, alongside local authors and well-known horror wordslingers in an eclectic joyride of subjects and styles.

PoS Editor and Written Remains matriarch J.M. Reinbold asked me to share a few words about the origins and inspiration of “To Heart’s Content”.

Although it appears as a stand-alone, “To Heart’s Content” is the continuation of a story called “Lost & Found”, which was first published in PerVisions (formerly Persistent Visions) in 2016 and reprinted in the Endless Apocalypse  anthology by Flame Tree Publishing in 2018. Both stories revolve around Danae, a young woman whose psychic connection to the landscape has helped her survive in a post-apocalyptic United States.

Illustration for “Lost and Found” (Persistent Visions, September 2016). Artwork by Kathryn M. Weaver
http://kathrynmweaver.com/

In “Lost & Found” we first meet Danae in the midst of a spiritual crisis: her powers have seemingly left her, and she is merely going through the motions with her survivalist lover, when she stumbles upon a clue to the whereabouts of an old flame.  The story ends with Danae knowingly leading her companions into danger in order to appease the longing of her own heart.

“Lost & Found” was a work that was a long time coming, inspired by my love of the post-apocalypse sub-genre as well as by my own recurrent dreams. I realized even as I was writing it that it was actually the beginning of a much larger story—one I plan to finish, one day, but not yet, as I’m far too busy with mundane life for the kind world-building a book like that would require.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I sat down years later to write a ghost story for A Plague of Shadows and found myself returning to those characters. The first thing to come to me was the love scene under the stained glass, and although much about the setting and even the faces were strange, I knew who they were. I recognized the way they feel about each other, and it all came rushing back. It was an absolute pleasure to write.

“To Heart’s Content” still leaves much of Danae’s story open, but I think it covers a lot of territory in a satisfying way. At least I hope so—I hope folks like it. If enough people bug me about it, maybe I’ll finally write the whole damn book. 🙂

Actually, there are more than thirteen ways to get nominated for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry’s Association’s Rhysling Award.  In fact this year there are 154 individual and unique poems up for consideration (which, if I’m not mistaken, is a record high).  Here are two, which happen to be mine, which I am posting so you can read them, as they are featured today on SpecPo, the SFPA’s official blog.

“Terran Mythology” first appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact (October 2016).  It is nominated for the 2017 Rhysling Award, Short Poem Category.

Terran Mythology

This talk of Old Earth is conflated,
it is—always was—a death garden
trash planet—
tree spines, titan turtle backs
native gutter talk.

No buried forests there, no vaulted mansions
tiered roadway arpeggios
beneath the dump-yards
no fish in those oceans
no thirteen stars in the sky.

It’s all folklore
piquant escape
from the firefields, factories
the appeal
of more than fortified water rations
in these populated ovens.

(As if deserts ever
birthed rivers
sustained “agrow-cultures”.
as if life evolved from mothers
from monkeys, was ever
anything
but science spew.)

—Shannon Connor Winward

“Thirteen Ways to See a Ghost” won second place the SFPA’s 2016 Poetry Contest in the Long Poem catgory.  It is nominated for the 2017 Rhysling Award, Long Poem Category.

Thirteen Ways to See a Ghost

1.
As a young woman, your mother finds a dead uncle watching her sleep. The chair is no longer wedged against the door.

2.
Neighbors tell her the couple who owned this house first lost a child. Your mother found him. The crayon marks in her closet could have come from her own, but she sees him, not much taller than the mattress, circumnavigating the bed, as children do, while your father and the boys are sleeping.

3.
You make a joke of it, but he bit her once, left marks, and how would you explain that?

4.
There’s a closet under the basement stairs, a perfect Bat Cave and hiding place. Not-it once, your brother hears, distinctly, Hi. He forfeits the game.

5.
You never found him, but you’ve lost enough in that closet.

6.
Your mother cleans the Hazard house, a squat yellow colonial leftover spitting distance from the old capitol with roots under the New Castle cobblestone. It reeks of piss and centuries. The basement stairs are narrow, dank. She prefers to leave it to the cats until one she’s never seen before climbs out and growls, Get out. After that, she makes the owner leave the Mop-n-Glo upstairs.

7.
“I’m supposed to be here,” she spits back. “You get out.”

8.
You do the Garrett mansion by the Pennsylvania border, too, when it’s still a school. Your job is to flip chairs for the boys, collect bits too big for the vacuum mouth. You visit the animals, nose to their cedar-lined cages, and the human skull, and play outside on the hill alone. You don’t remember the house, just the trees and open sky, the town of Yorklyn sleepy and rustling below, but Mom says those basements go deeper than any should. There are three, one under the next, and no one is allowed to go past the first. Slaves slept down there. It’s darker than dark, and what breathes out at you is not about freedom.

9.
Your grandfather slept in the basement until your mother kicked him out for whoring, and then he died. You don’t remember him, either.

10.
In second grade you start a ghost club. You hold hands over the drainage grates at recess (because the dead prefer damp, dark places) and tell lost souls to move on. The other girls swear they can see them too.

11.
In the basement of your parents’ house, your bags are packed. You are used to things sitting on the mattress, tugging the sheets, but that is no Casper-friendly child. That is man-sized. It is an absence of light, still there when you click on the lamp, but not after you scream. It doesn’t want you to go.

12.
You worked nights at the old school below where the Garrett house burned down. A caretaker haunts it, walking the halls, rustling papers, shutting doors—but this story is not about you.

13.
When they escort your parents to the room where your brother’s body lies waiting, your mother stammers, “I’ve never met anyone who died,” which, by any definition, just isn’t true.

—Shannon Connor Winward

“Ghosts, edited by Shannon Connor Winward, is a moving and wide-ranging collection of spectral verses that largely succeed in channeling the ghostly in singularly imaginative and even untrodden ways… The poems included in “Ghosts”have an admirable potency and synergy when read together… That these poems skirt the Scylla and Charybdis of over-reliance on genre tropes is their greatest strength.”

Many thanks to Michael J. Abolafia for his fabulous review (Spectral Realms 6) of the October 2016 issue of Eye to the Telescope—the “Ghosts” issue—which I guest-edited for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association.  Abolafia gives special shout-outs to poets L.W. Salinas, Holly Walrath, Suzan Pickford, Daniel R. Jones, Joe Nazare, Christina Sng, Andrea Bylthe, Jessica Horowitz, Lauren McBride, Ann K. Schwader, John W. Sexton, Rebecca Buchanan, Jane Yolen, James Edward O’Brien & Alex Harper.

In recent posts* I have been revisiting poems from the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited.  The issue went live October 15th, 2016.

In this last installment, we explore the “unmeasured” – the impossible up-not-down, the then that is too far to reach but close enough to feel, the ending that is not so much a beginning but a continuation.

*In case you missed any (or should you like to revisit them), links to the previous six posts in this series are located at the end of this feature.

silhouettes-808153_960_720

undying by John C. Mannone

|| laugh some
more || slip past the door
|| put your helmet & gear
in the corner of your
shanty and unbreak your
wife’s heart ||

Any exploration of a theme like “ghosts” that does not also deal with grief would be an exercise in frivolity.  That is why in this issue of Eye to the Telescope you will find poems of lost love and sorrow interspersed with the quirky and uncanny and tales of high ghostly adventure.  Death –that most central and inevitable drama of human existence–deserves the poet’s attention.

Of all the poems that I read for this issue, none were so exquisitely sad as  John C. Mannone’s “undying”.  I do not use this phrase lightly–this poem is not maudlin, it is not gothic in its grief.  Rather, Mannone gives us in unadorned language a series of mundane images–men doing everyday things like joking in an elevator, kissing their wives, drinking coffee.  The power of the poem is in its form: the actions play out backwards, calling quiet attention to the enormity of their sadness through their finality–the last sip, the last kiss, the last ride down into the coalmine.

The strength of “undying” is also in its impossibility: the men do not know they are doing these things for the last time.  We never know.  The poem asks the dead to reverse death, which of course they can’t, so the imperatives–unchoke, unkill, unbreak, untouch her, repeated over and over, are absolutely hopeless and awful, and wonderful in their ability to articulate utter loss.

Note, too, the appearance of the poem (a long, vertical column, like an elevator shaft) and the structural || positioned throughout, wherever the narration pauses for breath.  Clever, clever.

John C. Mannone has over 550 works published in venues such as Gyroscope Review, New England Journal of Medicine, Inscape Literary Journal, Windhover, 2016 Texas Poetry Calendar, Baltimore Review, Pedestal, Pirene’s Fountain, Event Horizon Magazine and Syzygy Journal. He’s been awarded a 2016 Weymouth writing residency and has two literary poetry collections, including one on disability, Disabled Monsters (The Linnet’s Wings Press, Dec 2015) featured at the 28th Southern Festival of Books. He edits poetry for Silver Blade and Abyss & Apex, and he’s a college professor of physics in east Tennessee. Visit jcmannone.wordpress.com

seamce

Séance at Black Horse Pike

by James Edward O’Brien

Even deaf, the pain’s just as prickly, the distance too long to mend with the legs we’ve been given, or the legs taken from us.
There hasn’t been a boot sole cobbled to suit a journey like this…

“Séance at Black Horse Pike” reads like an epigraph to “undying”, and, really, to all the poems in this collection.  It has the thumps and flickers of a séance but it is really a reflection on death, and life– the whole painful business.  I feel like Black Horse Pike could be anywhere we sense history, the comings and goings (always goings) of lives, “then” and “now” separated by a notion of time thin as a well-worn carpet, yet set apart by an impossible, impassible distance.  Perhaps what we think of as ghosts are just those who, like us, have been struck by their own mortality there–perhaps the cold drafts and distant footfalls are just echoes of our existential dread.

I find the second-to-last stanza quite interesting: the only thing uplifting, life-affirming in the whole poem, the “overripe plumb” (our youthful expectations? the long-gone fruit of Eden?) appears out of nowhere and just hangs there, mocking, out of reach.  How ghastly! But how gorgeous.

A bit of trivia: James Edward O’Brien wrote “Séance at Black Horse Pike” in traditional stanzas; it was a mysterious technical glitch that caused his submission to appear to me as a prose poem.  We only discovered the mishap in the wee hours before publication; I liked it so much this way, I convinced him to keep it.  Special props to Jim for obliging me.  What do you think-how would the poem read, if framed differently?

James Edward O’Brien lives in Far Rockaway, NY, with his wife and dogs. His poetry has appeared in Nerve Cowboy, Black Bear Review, WordWrights, and Bathtub Gin. His speculative fiction appears in Cyclopean, 87 Bedford, and Hybrid Moments: A Literary Tribute to The Misfits. Jim’s chapbook, Broke-down Shotgun Blues, was awarded first place in Nerve Cowboy’s 2002 Chapbook Contest.

circle-line

But after by Alex Harper

and though
the shadow of the end
lengthens as the day grows old
then turns to dust
it will restart at dawn—
remember this

My choice to place Alex Harper’s “But After” at the end of this issue was largely self-indulgent: not only does it give us a much needed upswing after the dark turnings of the previous poems, it also encapsulates my own hope and faith for the afterlife.

In my submission call, I quoted these lines from Manuel Acuña‘s “Before a Corpse”: Existence is a circle, and we err/when we assign to it for measurement/the limits of the cradle and the grave.”  “But After” was the answer to that poem I was hoping for.  In many of the works we’ve seen, death is not an ending, but Harper’s is the only one in which death is just a temporary reprieve from the real business of living.

To me, “But After” takes a stab at that most essential of life’s questions: why.  Why do we do this? Why do die? Why do we live? Because

there are things to do
you left undone and seas to watch
you’ve never seen, words
you’ve never spoken and there is
always hope

Existence is a circle, and, in a way, Eye to the Telescope #22 ends where it started; the ghost given form in the body, given meaning in the poem, here to be lived, read, written, over and over again.

Alex Harper has been published in Liminality, Mirror Dance, Not One of Us, Kaleidotrope, and Cordite Poetry Review, among others. He lives in England and can be found online at palexharperwriting.wordpress.com and on Twitter as @harpertext.

 

Want to have another go? Revisit the poems from Eye to the Telescope #22, “The Ghosts Issue” here:

Part 1: Intro – featuring poems by y L.W. Salinas, Holly Walrath and Akua Lezli Hope

Part 2: From Archetype to Personal – featuring poems by Robin Husen, Dawn Cunningham, Suzan Pickford and Cathleen Allyn Conway.

Part 3: Planes, Trains, and Gooseberry Jam – featuring poems by F.J. Bergmann, Daniel R. Jones, Joe Nazare and Oliver Smith

Part 4: Ghosts Without, Ghosts Within – featuring poems by Christina Sng, Andrea Blythe, Aisha Tayo Ijadunola and Lev Mirov.

Part 5: Space Ghosts – featuring poems by Jessica J. Horowitz, Charles Christian, Lauren McBride, Ann K. Schwader and Deborah L. Davitt.

Part 6: Into the Wild – featuring poems by Wendy Rathbone, John W. Sexton, Rebecca Buchanan and Jane Yolen

Part 7: The Unmeasured – featuring poems by John C. Mannone, James Edward O’Brien and Alex Harper

In recent posts I have been revisiting poems from the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited.  The issue went live October 15th.

Today we continue the series with four ghost poems that subvert expectations, from humanity’s place in the universe and Nature, to the nature of grief.

 

8730930781_a9dd2f8b03_z

https://www.flickr.com/photos/67194724@N03/8730930781

Three Worlds by Wendy Rathbone

the first
a world of red sky
and lightning and jagged doorways
became a mirror in which
I crumbled

Any meaningful contemplation of ghosts must lead us eventually to life’s fundamental questions: not just “where do we go when we die” but “where do we come from”,  “what are we made of”, and “why are we here?”

Some of my favorite poems among those submitted to the “Ghosts” issue are those that embrace these essential mysteries.  Wendy Rathbone’s “Three Worlds” is one fantastic example.  Appearing at the cusp of our extraterrestrial  ghost poems, “Three Worlds” takes us not just to new star systems but other planes of existence entirely; realms of the spirit, or soul.  Three, to be exact– each uniquely horrible and wonderful.

Though they read like pure imagination, we know these three worlds are somehow threaded to the life and death questions because of the poem’s first line (“Once when I did not exist/three worlds called to me”) and the closing (“I had to… give up the years/and make my eyes husks/and dangle my skeleton like a bell over the adrift dimensions/to meet my ghost”.

The lines imply a sacrifice, but they also suggest that the nature of our existence is a choice.  It’s empowering, and it begs the question–if we could be anywhere, why are we here, in this plane where we are nursed on “leaves and stars”?

I love the possibilities engendered by this poem: it reminds me of that meme buzzing around the internet: you are a ghost driving a meat-coated skeleton made from stardust — what are you afraid of?

Wendy Rathbone has had over 500 poems published in places like Asimov’s, Apex, Pedestal, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, Dreams and Nightmares, HWA Showcase and more. Her most recent collection, Turn Left at November, is nominated for an Elgin. She also writes and publishes novels and short stories. You can find her on Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, Tumblr, and her blog: wendyrathbone.blogspot.com/

 

moths

http://nataliadrepina.deviantart.com/art/Evanescent-light-for-little-moths-559088206

Bright Matter by John W. Sexton

They so desperately wanted to die.
In the morning dull smears dotted the pane.
But the ghost moths covered her: a robe of light.
More alive dead than when they were alive.

Rathbone’s “Three Worlds” and John W. Sexton’s “Bright Matter” are both delightfully surreal.  They also share an interest in the ghostly symbolism of moths–strange little beings that flutter, spectral and soft, in the dark.  I could not resist positioning them back to back.

Yet where Rathbone’s moths are poetic and passing, “Bright Matter” is devoted to the creatures–a wholly unexpected and fascinating choice in which the human of the narrative (poor Sally) is really just an afterthought, a sad little phenom who  for some reason can sense the presence of moth souls: thousands and thousands of them, all around.

Even more wonderfully bizarre is the poem’s revelation that moths are suicidal for a reason — “Destined to burn they are born already burned,” yearning for the greatest porch light of all. Sally cannot understand it, but the poet lets us in on the secret: their transitory existence contributes bit by infinitesimal silvery bit to a mysterious cosmic metabolic process, like an hourglass counting off centuries, or the galaxy slowly shifting its weight.  When the sun finally reaches critical moth mass, what then?

John W. Sexton lives in the Republic of Ireland and is a Muse pagan. His fifth poetry collection, The Offspring of the Moon, has just been published by Salmon Poetry. His sixth collection, Futures Pass, is also forthcoming in 2017 from the same publisher. In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. His speculative poems are widely published and some have appeared in Apex, The Edinburgh Review, The Irish Times, Liminality, Mithila Review, Mirror Dance, The Pedestal Magazine, Silver Blade and Strange Horizons.

deer

a stranger in the cemetery whispered to me by Rebecca Buchanan

it is said by those
who claim to know the
truth of such things that
only two-legged
animals possess
souls.

While Sexton’s insect specters were an unprecedented choice, animal ghosts were surprisingly popular among the poems submitted to this issue of Eye to the Telescope.  That is to say, pet ghosts were popular–many spirit cats padded their way across my laptop, along with a few faithful dead dogs (which begs the question – is it easier to imagine cat ghosts? or are speculative poets more likely to be cat people? hmm.)

Rebecca Buchanan’s “a stranger in the cemetery whispered to me” stood out for its focus on wild animals — denizens of nature haunting the woods and “edges of ev’ry/road”,  echoing the cycle of seasons, of life, even in spirit form.  More than this, though, Buchanan’s poem completely subverts our arrogant human assumption that we’re the only species that has ghosts; indeed, it dares to suggest that we’re the only species that doesn’t. 

I like the mystery and subtle mockery of this poem–while the animal spirits are “bright-eyed” and animate, the eponymous “stranger” and “me” are both nondescript, abstracts that don’t even warrant capital letters.  The “cemetery”, too, is a mere sketch of a setting –just a yard of stones, perhaps, demarking nothing of importance.

Rebecca Buchanan is the editor of the Pagan literary ezine, Eternal Haunted Summer. She has been previously published, or has work forthcoming, in Bards and Sages Quarterly, Faerie Magazine, Luna Station Quarterly, Nebula Rift, New Realm, and other venues.

bear

Embracing the Bear by Jane Yolen

When he stands on his hind legs,
knee-deep in bracken, to embrace me,
he is so like a man, he breaks the spell.
(“Embracing the Bear.” Copyright © 2016 by Jane Yolen.)

Buchanan’s nod to Nature  (and humanity’s less-than-consequential place in it) sequed nicely with another poem that juxtaposes death, wilderness, and human impulse.

By far the most common ghost poems I received were “lost love” poems–pets, parents, and children, to be sure, but something about romantic love seems to wed particularly well with the notion of ghostly return.

Because my goal with this issue was to seek out the unusual, I was drawn to Jane Yolen’s “Embracing the Bear”, in which loss is not romanticized– just the opposite.   The poem evokes an almost aversive response to the bear that the narrator imagines, for a moment, is a returned husband.   The creature reeks of piss and sweat, semen… decay–yet it is this miasma that speaks to the narrator’s grief– a reaction akin to a widow smelling old, unwashed shirts, perhaps, but far more visceral and complicated.

What I found particularly interesting is that the poem can be read a number of ways: is the husband truly dead, or might he just as well be? Does the narrator “choose the bear” out of disappointment that the “ghosting” was just illusion –is the pain of eight years’ separation, brought so unexpectedly to the surface by this surprise encounter,  just too much bear?  Or is death in the animal’s embrace preferable to even one more day with a husband who is sickly, depressed, “married to death” or otherwise alive but no longer the man he used to be?

Jane Yolen, often called “The Hans Christian Andersen of America” is a much-published poet whose poems appear regularly in magazines, journals, anthologies, and in her own collections of poems, both for adults and children. She is a Grand Master of SFPA (Science Fiction/Fantasy Poetry Association.) She writes a poem a day that goes out to almost 750 readers. To subscribe: eepurl.com/bs28ab

In recent posts I have been revisiting poems from the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited.  The issue went live October 15th.

Today we continue the series with five exemplary science fiction poems that explore the far-out possibilities of ghosts in space.

stars-and-sky

Romance by Jessica J. Horowitz

… kiss me under the light
of long-dead stars.

Following the heavy fare of the previous poems,  Jessica Horowitz cleanses the palate with her sparklingly light short form, “Romance”.  The flirtatious nod to both fantasy and science in this Dwarf Star darling quickly captured my heart.

Our Telescope now fixed skyward, “Romance” also draws us into the uncharted realms of space, and the ghostly possibilities therein, and beyond.

Jessica Jo Horowitz is Korean-born, currently living in New England where she studies historical sword work and Asian mythology. Previous poems have appeared in ChiZine: Treatments of Light and Shade and Star*Line. Find her on Twitter @TransientJ.

 

1024px-kondratyev_russian_eva28

Little Lost Cosmonaut by Charles Christian

Standing by her capsule’s window
from time to time she sees the flares
of rocket-ships soaring up from Earth
Maybe tomorrow rescue will come?

Our Eye to the Telescope exploration of space-ly ghosts starts relatively close to home with Charles Christian’s love song to Valentinka, a (theoretical?) “Little Lost Cosmonaut” whose corpse was left in perpetual orbit after a botched space mission.  Decades later, the ghost of Valentinka still watches and waits, dreaming of what was–and, maybe, what could be?

Though macabre in concept, and infinitely lonely, “Little Lost Cosmonaut” yet has a charming, life-affirming musicality to it — I was taken with waltzing lines like “the taste of vodka, the smell of borscht/the sound of the balalaika/And walking hand-in-hand in Gorky Park.”

Christian offers the image of Valentinka sealed with her capsule “Like a Matryoshka nest of dolls,” but one could as easily imagine her as a ballerina inside a music box, just waiting for someone to lift the lid and let her dance.

Charles Christian is an English journalist, author, and occasional poet who writes about tech, geek stuff, folklore, pop culture and the just plain weird. He is the publisher of the Grievous Angel zine and editor of the 2016 Rhysling Anthology—and an English newspaper recently commissioned him to go on a werewolf hunt. He found nothing but does now have to shave more frequently when there is a full moon.

hypervelocity_impact_demonstration

in the starship junkyard by Lauren McBride

in the starship junkyard
at night
viewscreens flicker on—

Bookending “Little Lost Cosmonaut” is yet another Dwarf Star potential, ” in the starship junkyard…” by Lauren McBride.  While it’s a challenge to feature this one without reprinting the whole precious thing, I urge you to give it a read in context.  Let the image sit with you a bit, especially this side of Valentinka’s lonely echo.  Feel us drift far from our familiar arcs, out into space and time to distant tomorrows, where humankind expands ever outward, and our loyal machines dream…

Lauren McBride finds inspiration in faith, nature, science and membership in the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Nominated for the SFPA’s Rhysling and Dwarf Stars Awards, her work has appeared in numerous speculative, nature, and children’s publications including Dreams & Nightmares, Silver Blade, and Grievous Angel. She shares a love of laughter and the ocean with her husband and two grown children.

triple-star_sunset

New World Haunting by Ann K. Schwader

Against a sun
that spawns no shadows, drifting as we must
across this landscape loaded like a gun
no longer fit to kill us, we aspire
despite ourselves.

With Ann K. Schwader’s “New World Haunting”, our journey takes us out beyond all known borders into utterly alien ghostly realms.  Building on the mechanical echoes of space capsules and starships in the previous poems, “New World” ousts us from sleep pods-turned-coffins into uncharted worlds, where we find ourselves short of bodies but no less eager to explore.

I love the forward motion of this poem, the way one line strains to become the next, mirroring the underlying theme of humanity’s ambition and drive.  I love the concept of space travelers fueled by such passion that even death cannot halt their momentum.

Ann K. Schwader’s most recent poetry collection, Dark Energies, appeared in 2015 from P’rea Press. It recently placed third in this year’s Elgin Awards for full-length collection. Ann is a two-time Bram Stoker Award Finalist, and has received Rhysling Awards for both short and long form work. She was the Poet Laureate for NecronomiCon Providence in 2015. A Wyoming native, she now lives and writes in suburban Colorado. Find out more at home.earthlink.net/~schwader

alien-eye

Possession by Deborah L. Davitt

We were meant to wake
when received by antennas,
downloaded into
undying mechanoid forms,
a fresh start on distant worlds.

With a thrust similar to “New World Haunting”, Deborah L. Davitt’s “Possession” also braves new alien realms.  However, Davitt does this darkly, deftly weaving science fiction and psychological horror.

Though “Possession” (aptly named) revisits the possession trope, this poem eschews cliché by reimagining possession as technology gone wrong.  Against a backdrop of planetary apocalypse, the possessor here is a human? maybe?–ghost? or program? sustained for countless years before being accidentally downloaded into an alien creature.

Or… OR, perhaps the alien is a human, and the “ghost” is the alien…

With the final stanzas, Davitt weaves together two points-of-view: the hapless space “ghost” and the rightful owner of the body it now inhabits.  Drawing on even more classic genre tropes, “Possession” leaves open the possibility that perhaps the whole thing is just a story, a psychosis dreamt up in some demented being’s (person’s?) head.

However you read it, “Possession” aced the challenge of taking ghost stories in new and unexpected directions.  Genre poetry at its finest.

Deborah L. Davitt grew up in Reno, Nevada, took her BA in English Lit at UNR, and earned her MA in English from Penn State. Since then, she has taught composition, rhetoric, and technical writing, and has worked as a technical writer in industries including nuclear submarines, NASA, and computer manufacturing. She currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and son. She’s been fortunate to have her poetry  published in Star*Line, Blue Monday Review’s Storytime Challenge, Dreams & Nightmares, Silver Blade, Poetry Quarterly, and other venues. A short story of hers, “The Cenotaph,” appeared in Intergalactic Medicine Show in Sept. 2016. She’s best known for her alternate-history/fantasy books, the Saga of Edda-Earth. You can find more of her work through her website: edda-earth.com

In recent posts I have been revisiting poems from the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited.  The issue went live October 15th.

Today we continue the series with four poems exploring a range of spectral manifestations, from ghastly ghostly weather to spirits that consume us from within.

ghost-month

Ghost Month by Christina Sng

August rain falls lightly
On the summer-scorched soil.
The ghost month is taking its toll,
With spirits about a thousandfold.

Christina Sng’s skill with short form poetry shimmers forth in “Ghost Month”.  Like traditional haiku, the poem reflects upon the natural world, obliquely evoking  emotion or insight.  Yet “Ghost Month” slips easily between the natural and the supernatural — a lovely vein of magical realism which accepts spirits as part of the everyday landscape — at least for the duration of “the ghost month“.

I was particularly taken with the atmospheric quality of these five concise couplets, with their gentle rhymes.  Like spectral offerings, the effect is haunting and enduringly satisfying.

Christina Sng is a poet, writer, and artist. Her work has received nominations in the Dwarf Stars and Rhysling Awards as well as Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She is the author of several chapbooks, most recently, Dark Dreams (Smashwords, 2011) and A Constellation of Songs (Origami Poems Project, 2016). Her first two full-length books, Astropoetry (Alban Lake Publishing, 2016) and A Collection of Nightmares (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2016) are slated for winter this year. Visit her online at christinasng.com.

 

melting-man

Summer Hauntings by Andrea Blythe

Even the ghosts
collapse over clotheslines and tree branches, dripping
like clocks in a Dalí painting, all
their footsteps and whisperings, cupboard slamming and shadowing
stilled by the oppression of the hot night…

Of course, “Ghost Month” dovetails perfectly with Andrea Blythe’s “Summer Hauntings”.  Like “Ghost Month”, Blythe’s poem describes the overlap of the ghostly with the everyday as if it were a natural phenomenon, like a heat wave.

“Summer Hauntings”, too, is delightfully atmospheric; the reader comes away feeling sticky and damp with these wonderful words.

I especially love the invocation of Dalí, to compare sagging ghosts with melting clocks — it gives a certain authority to the images, allowing the entire poem to serve as a surrealistic painting.  Blythe’s descriptive technique is fantastic, enviable.  I love chewing on this poem, like summer taffy.

Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. Her first chapbook of poetry, Pantheon, is forthcoming from ELJ Publications in August 2017. Her work has also appeared in several publications, including Yellow Chair Review, Nonbinary Review, Linden Avenue, and Strange Horizons. She serves as an associate editor for Zoetic Press  and is a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Learn more at andreablythe.com

 

yoruba

No Longer Mine by Aisha Tayo Ijadunola

Each spoonful she puts to my mouth
You steal it, you always steal
How long has it been since I’ve eaten?
I can’t remember

In a dramatic shift of tone, “No Longer Mine” by Aisha Tayo Ijadunola is a powerful short piece that leaves the reader feeling anemic, gutted, like the child held captive by a rapacious spirit.

For this issue of Eye to the Telescope I was careful to draw distinctions between ghosts and other myths and beasties, such as corporeal undead (zombies) and, say, demons.  But “possession” stories are part and parcel with ghost cannon — this idea that spirits envy us our flesh, and seek to take it from us, subduing or ousting our own souls in the process.

Abiku is a Yorubas (West African) word meaning “that which possesses death” or  “predestined to death”, referring to a type of spirit that attacks children; its victims are often the successive offspring of one mother.  Perhaps the Abiku is something alien, a demon that develops a taste for a particular bloodline; or perhaps it is the ghost of a child who won’t let go, returning to its natural mother over and over.   In either case, that mother-child bond, (“She was crying for me/She knows I’m close) is at the heart of this poem, and the heart of its horror.

I found the repetition of the final lines particularly moving: the “Aren’t you full/Aren’t you done” refrain strikes like a hollow drum, and sucked-out bone: an echo of longing, hunger, and loss.

Aisha Tayo Ijadunola is a London-based fantasy writer and digital artist. Her works often feature elements of Nigerian as well as other African myths and legends.

 

bauer

The Doppelgänger and the Ghost

by Lev Mirov

I am not what remains of her after the fire, or some phoenix—
I am what the house was hiding, locked away,
set free into the ruin after the conflagration
the unloved brother that starved, forgotten.

There is a notable similarity in theme between “No Longer Mine” and Lev Mirov’s “The Doppelgänger and the Ghost”.  Both deal with the struggle of spirits for ownership of flesh.  But while “No Longer Mine” gives a human voice to a ghostly myth, “The Doppelgänger…” does double duty as a metaphor and memoir.

In this poem, the narrator is the natural, rightful owner of his own body — a survivor of a battle with a pretty changeling who’d ensorcelled his parents into believing they’d birthed a girl.  The real tragedy, though, is that after defeating the usurper, the narrator has no victorious homecoming; his family grieves for their lost “girl”, the illusion.  Their disappointment drives him to examine “self”, again and again, searching his body and mind as if he must now constantly justify living in this skin.

While “The Doppelgänger and the Ghost” is a compelling story in its own right (a mash-up of the “fairy changeling” and “evil double” motifs, with a cool gender subversion), and beautifully written, it’s also a powerful metaphor for the psychological- and body-trauma often faced by people on the LGBT spectrum.

Though its length might have made it a hard-fit because of budget constraints (see my comments on “Tulpa” here), I found “Doppelgänger” too big – that is, too important –  to pass up.  I’m honored to debut  it in Eye to the Telescope.

Lev Mirov is a queer disabled mixed race Filipino-American medievalist who lives with his wife, fellow writer India Valentín, and their two cats in rural Maryland, where he feeds the ghosts of Antietam when it rains. His Rhysling-nominated poetry has been featured in Strange Horizons, Liminality Magazine, Pedestal Magazine, and other fine magazines and anthologies. His fiction appears in anthologies including Myriad Lands and the forthcoming Sunvault Anthology. To read his magical worlds and poems, find him at levmirov.wordpress.com or by following him on Twitter @thelionmachine.

Part 3 in a Series:

In my previous posts, I featured several poems from the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited.  The issue went live October 15th.

Today we continue the series with four very different genre poems that embody a spectrum of ghostly possibilities.

train

Not a Destination by F.J. Bergmann

In front of the hospital,
a somber chauffeur opened
the door of a limousine,
bowing, and he thought at first
that he would ride in style
all the way to the end…

In the last installment, we looked at how the ghost poems in Eye to the Telescope#22 transition from the abstract and epic to the intimate. F.J. Bergmann’s brief “Not a Destination” deftly moves us through a personal death towards what we might think of as the ultimate destination… only to find that the journey has just begun.

The blinking hospital lights and beeps of “Not a Destination” are a perfect fit with the poems just before and after: “Admittance” recalls a father’s resurrection in a hospital setting, while the you in Daniel Jones’ “Fevered Ream” slips from this mortal coil in room 607 of St Vincent’s.  To me, this trio of poems suggest a crossroads of possibilities: three slightly different routes for the departing soul.

The path of Bergmann’s “Not a Destination” takes a nicely dark turn; the deceased barely has a chance to settle into new accommodations before finding himself shuffled off again, sugar-plumb fantasies of  the afterlife dispersing with an ominous plume of smoke.  Like all the best ghost stories, this poem leaves it to the reader to fill in the gaps; it is our imagination that takes off from the station, towards a dark unknown.

F.J. Bergmann dreams of a future in which bios will need to be neither provided nor updated due to the perfection of mind-melding via hyperspatial dimensions. See fibitz.com for more ideation. She is the editor of Star*Line and the poetry editor of Mobius: The Journal of Social Change.

 

Planetary Nebula NGC 2818

Fevered Ream by Daniel R. Jones

you slip from your die-cast sarcophagus
comatose to ghost, soul tethered to body like a
dangling tooth a child is not willing to yank

 

“Fevered Ream” was one of those poems that rises up out of the slush and just stops time for a minute — what did I just read?  I love the breathlessness of this one, the rambling fever dream string of images, similes; a literary tossing and turning that suddenly lets go with an explosive stanza of light and motion and a curious mixture of religious and scientific references (“Elysian nebula”, “between the star of Bethlehem and another”, “…blip on the Hubble”, “…a far cry from Mount Moriah”).

“Fevered Ream” raises more questions than it answers ( where does the arc of the soul lead, and what happens when it lands?) ; however I find the pace and tone and vivid organic language offer a promising counterpoint to the dark machinery of the previous poem.

What really sealed it for me, though, was the final line.  Gorgeous sci-fi poetry, that is.  Still gives me shivers.

Daniel Jones is a an MFA candidate at Lindenwood University, and a writer from Indianapolis, IN. Previously, he’s had work published in Aphelion, the South Bend Tribune, In the Bend, Spill Words Press, Time of Singing, and he won an award for best poem in the 2013 edition of Bethel College’s Crossings. He is currently serving as an editorial assistant for Issue 7 of The Lindenwood Review.

 

Now with nanobots!

Now with nanobots! https://www.flickr.com/photos/29233640@N07/3137493718

 

Hex Machina by Joe Nazare

The bitbots had been designed to reconstruct damaged cells,
But malfunctioned or mutated, escaped from the human
To overwhelm the landscape with a profusion of fabrication.

Speaking of science fiction: enter “Hex Machina” by Joe Nazare.  I just couldn’t say no to this one: ectoplasm, nanotech, an Armageddon of abundance… this was one of the most imaginative and clever poems in the bunch.

Truly, “Hex Machina” is so exemplary for this issue — a speculative poem that posits new and unexpected visions of the afterlife — there isn’t much more to say; except that “indiscriminate widgecraft” is my new favorite phrase ever.

Joe Nazare earned in a PhD in American Literature from New York University. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction can be found in such places as Dark Discoveries, Clowns: The Unlikely Coulrophobia Remix, Pseudopod, Star*Line, Grievous Angel, Death in Common, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, and Butcher Knives & Body Counts. He is also the author of the collection Autumn Lauds: Poems for the Halloween Season, and is currently hard at work readying Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: Ultimate Annotated Edition for ebook release on Amazon this autumn.

File source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Strawberry_jam_on_a_dish.JPG

Ma’s Late Knight Jam Session

by Oliver Smith

The long spines of his gooseberries
Were particularly impressive:
They grew sharper than lances, impaling
Dim-minded knights who had disembarked
From the number ten bus in search of Mount Badon.

Another one of my early favorites, “Ma’s Late Knight Jam Session” takes the chaos of “Hex Machina” and raises it to a level of delightful absurdity.  I LOL’d when I read this one, enamored with lines like “ground strawberries swelled red/ As the thrashed buttocks of masochistic elves” and “Now at breakfast time an eyeball stares/Accusingly from the bottom of the jar. It is red-rimmed and horribly medieval.”

I enjoyed Smith’s lofty language and descriptive prowess throughout, as well as the opportunity to refresh my understanding of British history.

I’m also a sucker for food in poetry.  He had me at “summer fruit” – though the combination of ghosts, food, and humor is deliciously and brilliantly macabre.

Oliver Smith is a visual artist and writer from Cheltenham, UK. He was born in 1966 and recently returned to university 25 years after graduating in Fine Art to study Creative Writing as a post-graduate research student. His poetry regularly appears in Spectral Realms and his short fiction has appeared in anthologies from Inkermen Press, Ex Occidente Press, Dark Hall Press, and History and Mystery LLC. Many of his previously anthologised stories and twenty poems are now collected in Basilisk Soup and Other Fantasies.  You can find out more about Oliver here.

In my last blog post, I featured several poems from the beginning of the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited.  The issue went live October 15th.

Today we continue the series with four poems that explore ghost tropes in skillful and novel ways, ranging from the abstract to the personal.

 

staircase

Upstairs Watches, Downstairs Waits

by Robin Husen

The grandfather clock in the hallway
Chips away at time.
The heart of this old house
The stairs are the spine
And every step touches a nerve

As you might imagine, the haunted house was one of the most popular themes for Eye to the Telescope #22  submissions (second only to lost love poems).  In “Upstairs Watches, Downstairs Waits” we find ourselves within the archetypal haunted house — no context, as if in a dream, no entrance or exit, just an Escher-like unfolding of housely features; the ticking clock, the creaking stairs.

In dream theory, the house represents the dreamer; Husen’s “Upstairs…Downstairs” suggests an eerie sympathy between the “you” that wanders room to room and the house’s bookends and edges, it’s beating heart.

I was particularly enamored with the second-to-last stanza, in which “everything turns on the/corner step” and the poem, too, takes a turn, a shift in perspective, speculating ominous possibilities.  It reads like a spiral, inviting you in, and down, again and again…

Robin Husen is a writer from Nottingham, England. He is an Open University graduate, and has an MA in Literary Linguistics from the University of Nottingham, where he wrote his dissertation on the use of negation in creating a sense of unease. “Upstairs Watches, Downstairs Waits” is his first published poem. His short fiction has appeared on Daily Science Fiction and is forthcoming on Far Fetched Fables.  When he isn’t writing, you can usually find him walking the dog. You can also find him on twitter @reliant_robin’

moonlight-kitchen

A Night at Gran’ma Ginny’s

by Dawn Cunningham

                                                                                                 Three
clear rectangles make a stairstep on the front door;
they stare into the changing
moon; the cymbals of oncoming clouds
talk     rock music; a light show speaks

Like “Upstairs Watches, Downstairs Waits”, “A Night at Gran’ma Ginny’s” struck me as a delightfully different take on the haunted house trope.  In this poem, too, we view the house as if through a dreamer’s eyes; or, rather, one stuck in that moment between dreams and waking, when everything has a quality of unreality, and we’re not sure we can trust what we perceive.

Cunningham uses vivid and sensory language and creative use of space to evoke a fun-house of impressions that make this poem so much more than an accounting of something creepy that happened in the middle of the night.  Though what is left unsaid–the reason the narrator is asleep in Gran’ma’s chair, perhaps, with a coat for a blanket–keeps us grounded in real life, in a real place, which makes the encounter all the more uncanny.

I especially love the soft ending of this poem: the sigh of a closing refrigerator door, the quiet snuffing out of a light so as to not disturb those sleeping nearby (and those, perhaps, who have had enough) .

The career of writing stories and poems began with Dawn Cunningham’s Gran’ma Ginny, where the Native American tradition was passed down. Through the storytelling, Ms. Cunningham began to write, first fiction, then poetry, and now nonfiction as well. She earned a BGS and MA through Indiana University. Her recent publications are in Confluence, Flare: The Flagler Review, Misfit Magazine, Shuf Poetry, and the upcoming Dandelions first appearance.

polter

Be My Geist: A Villanelle

by Suzan Pickford

No white glove test for clear
(until there is and “they’re here”)
haunted by remnants hidden deep in your closet.
What a “geist-ing” game communicating
when small blonde children sneak tv time
it’s no wonder you lost it, perplexed by the vortex.

As far as haunted houses go, the cemetery-straddling, portal-pulsing suburban two-story in”Poltergeist” (1982) takes the horror cake.  I grew up with this movie, I identified painfully with the straight-haired Carol Ann (gods rest her soul), and what remake, I can’t hear you, lalalala.

One of the perks of being an editor is that you get to pick what you like; so when Suzan Pickford answered my not-really-joking call for Poltergeist-themed poems with this tongue-in-cheek darling, I couldn’t resist.  While I suspect that the term “villanelle” is loosely applied, I love how she roped the most iconic bits from the film into the form.  Plus I love the internal rhyme and turn-of-phrase in “perplexed by the vortex”.  I just want to hug this poem like a scary clown doll.

Suzan Pickford: master of insomnia and java enthusiast. Born in Virginia to two New Yorkers, Suzan has been writing since early primary school when she began running out of accessible reading material and began crafting her own. Most recently featured in the Summer edition of The Cicada’s Cry—a micro-zine of Haiku Poetry, Suzan Pickford brings levity to themes not usually considered comedic in the fields of poetry, fiction, and screenwriting.

 phone

Admittance by Cathleen Allyn Conway

Dad calls me and says to come pick him up from the hospital.
“You know they’re trying to kill me in here.”
“But you’re dead,” I say.
“I’m better now,” he replies.
“It’s happened before.”

With “Admittance” by Cathleen Allyn Conway, we move from more abstract ghost poems into the realm of the intimate; personal tales of lost lives and lost loves.

“Admittance” begins with a phone call from beyond the grave, which places it squarely in the speculative genre.  However, the details are so relatable (“the nurse/straddled his Buddha belly like a lover”, “the flag was folded and the rifle-cracks in the cold/shocked choking sobs from Mom”), and the voice of the narrator is so insistently normal, this poem strikes me as one of the most realistic of the bunch.

The father’s  impossible voice on the line is almost secondary to the voice of loss expressed within, subtle but exquisite.  The universality of that grief is what struck me most about this poem.  “Admittance” deftly reminds of that we cannot examine ghosts without examining the empty places left among the living.

Cathleen Allyn Conway is finishing her PhD in creative writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the co-editor of Plath Profiles, the only academic journal dedicated to the work of Sylvia Plath, and the founder and editor of women’s protest poetry magazine Thank You For Swallowing. Her collection Static Cling is available from Dancing Girl Press. Originally from Chicago, she lives in south London with her partner and son.