Poems

Black Snow On Christmas Morning [Wraith]Black snow drifted down in slow-motion clumps, fat flakes the color of coal dust sticking to windows like fingerprints left at a crime,while the neighborhood inflatable reindeer lay half-deflated and twisted, carcasses of cheap joy slumped over plastic graves, frozen in mime.The whole block looked like a crime scene where […]

Bastille Day Backwards [Wraith]Down in the smoking trench of afterlives misfiled, where the heat curls paint off phantom stone and ash drifts slow like bored parade confetti, there stands a crooked fortress dressed in red and white and blue that all look strangely spoiled,Its towers lean like guilty men who remember which side they picked

Beneath the Tinsel Bazaar [Wraith]The parking lot is a frozen battlefield of shopping carts and skid marks, exhaust clouds hanging low like tired ghosts that never got paid for haunting this strip of town,Somewhere a bell ringer hammers out the same three notes on a dented handbell, red bucket swinging on a bent tripod stand

Ashes Sing Beneath the Yulefire [Wraith]The old brick throat of the fireplace yawns wide in the winter cottage chest, a hungry red mouth breathing heat like a promise it never intends to keep,On the grate lies the honored Yule log, dressed up with a circle of dried berries and cracked holly leaves, like a condemned

Ashfall Supper at the Edge of Never [Wraith]The sky hangs low like a bruise that never got the chance to heal, sick greens smeared into purples over a horizon of broken teeth and fumes and bone-dry dirt,Once there were forests here that sang in orange and red before winter came calling; now it’s all cracked

Ash on the Hearth of No One [Wraith]Snow packs the roof like a muted hand pressed firm over this cabin’s tired mouth, heavy and unbothered, weighing every beam down with a white shrug that says nobody’s coming up this mountain tonight,Tree line crowds close around the clearing, a circle of black-barked witnesses standing thigh-deep in

Ashes In The Vase [Wraith]Every year it starts the week before, when the grocery aisles bloom with pink and white ambush,Card racks yawning wide, covered in pastel lies about perfect mothers who never swore, never drank, never pushed.You stand there with a basket full of normal life, staring at row after row of scripted forgiveness

A Night The Walls Learned How To Listen [Wraith]Christmas Eve comes in sideways over the houses, all teeth-chattering cold and fake cheer stuck onto the doors with tape and thumbtacks and a prayer,Inside my place the tree blinks red and gold like it is trying to hypnotize the overdue bills on the table into growing

Apex Star over Hollow Holiday [Wraith]High above the cluttered living room where wrapping guts spill like intestines from torn boxes and the TV mutters an exhausted rerun into stale, sugared air, a star sits crooked on the fake pine needles, tilting like a drunk halo that never earned the right to be called holy in

Wrecking Ball in Heels She walked in wearing heels that cracked the floor like gunshots,every head turned at the sound before the sight arrived,and when the sight got there it hit like weather,a storm front wrapped in leather, barely surviving Her mouth was painted dark and when she smiledit wasn’t warmth—it was the grin before