Poems

Body-Shaped Holes The walls carried our secrets,body-shaped holes where my father threw me.I can still see the dents,feel the way my head hit the plaster–a perfect outline of pain. I never cried out loud.It wasn’t safe to let the tears fall. I learned to measure silence,to count the seconds between rage and quiet,hoping the storm […]

When Gods Go Starving Rotmouth stares through the shatter in the glass,ten thousand voices spitting nails in his brain.Halo cracked, horns splitting bone.Every prayer tastes like poison, every curse feels like home. There’s an angel in his marrow, screaming “hold the line,”but the devil behind his teeth grins and pours the wine.Sanity’s a rumor in

At the Edge of Comfort Beneath the blanket of routine, where shadows stretch and fears align,the edge of comfort is a drug, a lure to cross the hidden line.Step forth, brave fool, from your familiar grays, for comfort is nothing but haze. Beyond the known and past the shade, where comfort ghosts are left to

The Smell That Stays It stays in the carpet. It stays in the wood.The smell of the decomposition stoodits ground against the bleach, the enzyme cleaners,the ozone machines and the professional demeanorsof the crime scene crew who told me they could get it out. But the smell that stays is the smell of doubtthat anything

The Underneath I walk like nothing’s wrong, keep my voice controlled.Hands steady, eyes straight, every weakness on hold.But there’s something twitching in the corners of my calm,something sharp behind my quiet, pressing from the dark. I play normal—go to work, shake hands, laugh on cue.But there’s a heat inside my chest that’s always burning through.Every

Underneath the Red on the Door You lock the windows, double-check the latch.Lights flicker, heart pounds, shadows crawl across the glass.You hear footsteps echo on tile, slow and sure.Sweat beads your skin as silence floods the floor. You tell yourself it’s nothing, just a creak, just a breeze,but you feel it—something moves, you forget how

The Rot Begins in the GutThe stomach acid burns through its own wall at hour six,the enzymes that digested dinner now digest the fixof the body that produced them, the autodigestion startingin the cavity where the bacteria are charting their escape from the intestinal, the great migrationof the gut flora colonizing every stationof the body

The Shield of the Forgotten Hands carve sigils into the empty air,shaping light from the dark unseen.The sky is thick with fire,the earth split wide where steel has screamed,yet he does not flinch, does not bow,though the void itself has schemed. Forged from whispers of the ancients,from the weight of the buried earth,each symbol hums,

The Pale Throne of Mastema Choked up on battery acid hallucinations,cemetery mutts howling from beneath the old floorboards,blood dries on the pillow, ink crawls through the veins.I cross out each Sunday, box every filth-stained regret. The saints are shrieking from under the tiles,Mom’s ghost pouring bleach in the bathwater,fists stay buried in pockets, one finger

The Purge The body purges at the orifices first,the fluids seeking exit from the biological worstof the decomposition timeline, every opening a doorfor the liquid evidence of what the body held before. The nose, the mouth, the ears, the places where the livingonce received the world now doing the posthumous givingback of everything the body