Ode to the Dead Soul

The blue sea is burning in the leaves of the trees 
The roar that pierced the sky stopped
 Each chapter of the novel is titled 'Black Sorrow'. 
The dry path crawls past like a reptile
 Wailing wails across the fields 
The tension of the invisible thread in the whole being
 When will the sailor anchor in the unknown island? 
Existence will sink into the abyss of space
 A couple of birds perched on a dry branch, silent readers
 A portrait in new white cloth
 The soul of the solar system has hidden itself 
The saint's body will be destroyed
 Soul will get immortality.

----------------------------------------------------------------
gets longer each year
 

another year

another birthday

 

another shot at

being oblivious

 

but every scar

tells a story that

gets longer each

year

 

some think i am

getting better

 

some wonder why

i'm still here

 

death and i dance

a few times each

week it seems

 

the closer we get

the harder it is to

let go

 

those piercing eyes

melt me every damn

time

 

one night, we'll close

this bar down and put

on a show in the

parking lot

 

two drunks madly

in love
------------------------------------------------------------------------
on a wednesday in january
 

another morning

spent in a rehab

facility

 

third time this

week

 

yet another

disadvantage

of not dying

young
----------------------------------------------------------------
longer to mature
 

she doesn't laugh

at my dirty jokes

 

i remind her that

males often take

longer to mature

 

she gives me the

look

 

i believe that

means she's

quickly running

out of patience

 

if i have learned

anything over

all my years

 

it's when to just

shut the fuck up
----------------------------------------------------
the phone sex buddy
 

i think of those three

in the morning phone

calls

 

whispers of passion

while hoping not to

wake up anyone in

the house

 

there's a certain

joy hearing a woman

scream at something

your imagination

was able to create

 

it would be even

more amazing if

she thought you

were capable of

doing anything

else

 

hell is falling in

love with the phone

sex buddy that never

ever thinks of meeting

 

or giving you the time

of day if you happen

to stumble into each

other on the streets of

any random big city

on the east coast
--------------------------------------------------------
followed by thunderstorms
 

spring in ohio is usually

a couple inches of snow

followed by thunderstorms

 

a few stories of murder

bank robberies and you

can't go a day without

someone abusing a child

 

i'd like to think we are special

 

but it's most likely our shit

stinks just like everyone else



J.J. Campbell (1976 - ?) is old enough to know better. He's been widely published over the years, most recently at Horror Sleaze Trash, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Asylum Floor, Misfit Magazine and Disturb the Universe Magazine. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. 

my nose says 'frost' to the rest of me




a three-crow caw alarm




the old age moon's lousy company




the broken intermolecular bonds in the water the plum twig sips




cutting the mouse tail off the white turnip




he took his blood-blisters into the next world




flybys to the outer planets: dumpster dives for the Son of Man




the extinction of languages right up to this shoo-be-doo-da-day




Saturday morning: negotiating the release of a tree frog




when they caught him, he was knighting sunflowers with a switch




Oh, the Dardanelles of sleeplessness




the soft tread of a Shawnee hunting party: city sirens




making a wish on the star atop her parochial school paper




deep in tinseled thoughts of long ago




I was sitting next to one of those zero sum guys who wouldn't hurt a fly

Ghoul

Fenster Loomis, an eight-going-on-nine-year-old boy, loved playing in the cemetery. In school, he had been struggling to read, but now he was enjoying much success at perusing the tombstones, grave markers, and monuments in the old graveyard. It helped build his math skills as well; with the subtraction of the dates of birth from the dates of death he could calculate the age at which each person had been at the time of their passing. He was becoming markedly talented at arithmetic for a third grader.

His parents, when told that their only child was whiling away his time at the old graveyard, with its black metal fence, overgrown weeds, and ancient grave markers, simply shrugged. Who was there to care enough to lodge a complaint against young Fenster? What trouble could he possibly get in there? What Jesse and Helen Loomis did not know, nor even suspect, was that their son, now on summer vacation prior to entering the fourth grade, had taken to vandalizing the eternal resting places of the village’s forebears.

Fenster would deface the tombstones with a hammer and chisel in order to make nasty words from what was inscribed. He would struggle mightily to overturn the markers of those whose presence for whatever reason did not please him. He would pee on the monuments, screaming giddily all the while. Fenster Loomis was, of, course, quite insane.

Few people visited the old burial ground; it had reached capacity at least seventy-five years before, which meant that no one remembered anyone who was there interred. Which suited Fenster right down to the ground.

Just prior to his ninth birthday, young Fenster was struck by a new and exciting idea, which was engendered by an old creepy movie he’d seen on channel 8 late one night: grave robbery. Fenster didn’t aspire to collect body parts in order to fashion a monster, as the uncanny Victor Frankenstein had done. No, he wanted the watches, rings, bracelets, necklaces, and other pricey baubles with which the dearly departed – or, as Fenster unfeelingly called them, the corpses – had been buried.

Employing a pick and a spade borrowed from his father’s garden shed, he made his first ambitious foray into grave robbery. Working in the late afternoon sun of July, Fenster worked through nearly four feet of turgid soil before he struck paydirt: the coffin lid. With a final swing of the pick, he smashed through the casket with a loud crunch. His eyes wide, Fenster knelt before the revealed sarcophagus and shoved his hands into the depths of the vessel.

Not really knowing what to expect, Fenster allowed the excitement of the moment to carry him away. Thrusting his hands into the muck, he was relieved to find not goop, guts, and glop, but rather, mere layers of dust. Using the spade, he enlarged the aperture and sifted through the contents. At last he found something hard and small and, pulling it out, shiny. It was a ring – a wedding ring. He peered at the tombstone, which disclosed that the deceased was Margaret Hatcher, who had lived between 1825 and 1879. “She was 54 when she croaked,” murmured the graverobber indifferently. In more than a half century, Fenster decided, the old broad should have accumulated more than one lousy ring. He plunged again into the hole he’d made and threshed through the bodily remains of Margaret Hatcher, but turned up nothing else. Glancing at her tombstone, he noted that she had died on this very day, July 7.

Next, Fenster disinterred the remains of another corpse, this time a man, Elmer Wooden, who had lived seventy-one years, between 1840 and 1911. Elmer offered up several valuable articles: a well-used but finely-crafted meerschaum pipe, a diminutive pinkie ring, and curiously, a rather garish brooch. Rummaging through the old man’s suit jacket, he also found a really stunning bracelet that was festooned with gems. Glancing back at the gravestone, Fenster noted that Elmer had likewise passed on that very day, July 7. Huh, thought Fenster. That was a coincidence. Pocketing the bracelet and necklace, he stored the pipe away and slipped the ring onto his finger. Fenster moved on to the next grave site. And so it went. over the remaining three weeks of July, Fenster, motivated by the riches he’d so far purloined, despoiled more than 100 graves, none of which produced any more treasures. Fenster grew disheartened, tossing off his earlier success as beginner’s luck. As August commenced, it became just too hot to continue with the toil, and Fenster quitted the cemetery. He took with him his concealed stash.

Curious, he consulted the village library to check out Margaret Hatcher and Elmer Wooden, who had generously provided him with the five keepsakes that he now kept in a cigar box in the bottom drawer of the dresser in his bedroom. What he found intrigued him: Wooden had served time in the penitentiary for – get this – graverobbing. His whole family seemed to have had a scurrilous reputation for one thing or another. And Mary Hatcher was Elmer Wooden’s maternal aunt. Fenster filed this information away for later use.

As induction into the 4th grade neared, Fenster wondered just what he should do with the swag he’d confiscated. An answer appeared straight away on the occasion of his father’s 39th birthday. His mother, Helen, as was her habit, gave Fenster money with which to purchase a gift for his dad. Rather than journeying to Macy’s, as she had suggested, Fenster took out the meerschaum pipe he’d found with the late Elmer Wooden, wrapped it gaudily – he knew his parents were charmed by the infantile and primitive manner in which he packaged their presents – and gave it to his father.

Jesse Loomis was impressed. An avid pipe smoker, he regarded the gift with keen appreciation. “You know,” he said around the table at the birthday dinner, “they haven’t made this particular meerschaum for at least a hundred years.”

Uh oh, thought Fenster regretfully.

“Where did you find it, Fen?”

Fenster furrowed his brow in thought, straining to find a convincing answer. But, in addition to being an abject graverobber, Fenster Loomis was also an accomplished liar. “At a Resellit shop in the village,” he replied duplicitously.

“I love it, son. Thank you.” Father and son grinned happily.

Later, as they were doing the dishes, Jesse leaned close to Helen and remarked, taking up and fingering the high-relief meerschaum, “I wonder how Fen could possibly have afforded such a thing?”

“Why,” asked Helen, “is that one expensive?”

“Yeah. In this shape. It must have cost at least $300.”

“Really?” asked Helen, her eyes widening in surprise. “I only gave him $40.”

“Well,” said Jesse, gripping the stem of the old pipe comfortably in his jaws, “he got it at a Resellit shop. Maybe they didn’t realize what they had.”

On the first day of fourth grade, Fenster took a fancy to blonde and pretty Hermione Brown, probably the hottest girl in the class, he thought. He longed to get close to her. She, on the other hand, did not return Fenster’s feelings at all.

“Go play in the traffic,” she snarled when he asked her to sit by him at lunch. Fenster blinked in bewilderment. Not only was he the tallest boy in his class, but he was by this time the best reader as well, plus he was a whiz at math. So he sat by himself and contemplated his dilemma. The solution occurred to him almost instantly: the trove of loot that he’d ripped off from the corpses at the cemetery.

The next day, he walked boldly up to Hermione and said, suavely, for a nine-year-old, “The sun rises in your eyes and reflects in the gems in this necklace.” Not bad, he thought to himself, proffering the brooch.

Hermione was utterly shocked, and being a greedy child, she immediately took possession of the bauble and dedicated her soul to her new benefactor.

At Christmas, the fourth grade celebrated the holiday with a party. Because there were students who came from poorer homes, it was decided not to exchange presents. Ms. Bristol, the teacher, however, eagerly accepted anything that the children brought her way. And Fenster, taking advantage of his diminishing cache of gems, gave Ms. Bristol an elaborate opal ring – the pinkie ring he’d discovered among the effects of Elmer Wooden. Ms. Bristol’s eyes opened wide, then she relaxed. No fourth grader would gift his teacher a real opal, diamond, and gold ring; it was obviously a knockoff, but it was sweet, she thought. At once, she raised Fenster’s grade point average by a half point.

The ensuing summer, Fenster attended summer school, taking an advanced algebra course with students two grades ahead of him. What with his studies and his unofficial girlfriend, the beautiful Hermione, still fully smitten by his largesse, Fenster had no time for graverobbing. But then a strange thing occurred.

On July 7th, algebra class was in session. Ms. Bristol, the fourth-grade teacher, was subbing for the algebra instructor, and wearing her fancy ring. She had tried several times to remove it from her finger, but it was stuck on. Baby oil, soap, petroleum jelly – you name it – nothing worked. But it wasn’t too tight, and it was gorgeous, so she just kept it on. As her students grappled with a math test, Ms. Bristol began feeling the ring tighten on her finger. It was crushing her! Students looked up curiously as he strained to remove it, but it was hopeless. She screamed frightfully as the ring cut all the way through her finger, leaving a severed, bloody digit wriggling eerily on her desk. Students shrieked in alarm, and Ms. Bristol sobbed in pain. The blood kept flowing out of her mangled hand, and she soon bled out.

Fenster, like all the other kids, was shaken. He only vaguely associated Ms. Bristol’s terrible fate with his gift. He hadn’t noticed that she was even wearing his ring. Paramedics, police, and the coroner were all summoned; class was cancelled for the remainder of the week, until a new instructor could be found.

That evening, Fenster met with his unofficial girlfriend in the park. Sitting on a green-painted bench, they reflected on the unhappy ending of their fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Bristol. Fenster recalled with relish the untimely demise of their teacher. Remember: he was insane. Tears seeped out of the little girl’s eyes; she’d loved her teacher and, though greedy, Hermione wasn’t crazy. Soon they were talking gaily about happier things when suddenly Hermione drew her hands to her neck and gasped in pain.

“What’s wrong?” asked Fenster with concern. He really liked Hermione.

But Hermione couldn’t talk; the necklace was cutting off her wind and strangling her. Fenster tried to dig his fingers under the necklace chain, but it was too tightly fixed to his true love’s neck. Fenster shouted at others in the park to help, and a policeman turned up; but he had no better luck than Fenster. After struggling for ten minutes to help the little girl, the policeman and the EMTs he’d called failed. Hermione was dead.

Mr. and Mrs. Loomis showed up at the police station to reclaim their son, whom the authorities had taken into protective custody to question. They also feared the obvious trauma that observing a teacher as well as a friend mysteriously die would have on any child. No one could offer any explanation for the sudden and violent deaths of the teacher and the girl.

The Loomises did their best to console their son; speaking out of his presence, they conversed on young Hermione’s tragic passing. “I wonder,” said Helen, “where she got that horrible necklace?” But Fenster heard. He often eavesdropped on private conversations. His eyes grew big as saucers as he recalled that it was he who had given the jewelry to both Hermione and Ms. Bristol. What could it mean? he wondered wildly. Was it some sort of retribution from beyond the grave? He found himself panicky and sweating.

Then he remembered: the meerschaum! He had given his dad the antique pipe he’d found in the old man’s casket. Was it some kind of bizarre coincidence? he wondered. What might happen to his dad? He rushed from his room and into the living room, where his dad was scrunching tobacco into the meerschaum. Before Fenster could say a word, his father scraped a kitchen match on the side of the box of matches and applied the flame. Then Fenster thought, it’s only a pipe; what could possibly happen? His question was answered moments later, when the air grew fiercely hot around the chair in which Jesse sat. Then a miasma of burning flesh suffused the air, and a potent, terrible effluvium of gray smoke wafted through the air.

Mr. Loomis seemed not to even be aware of what was happening. He drew heavily on his pipe, smiled with pleasure, and then released a stream of fragrant smoke. Next, he suddenly and spontaneously combusted. Tentatively, Fenster approached the recliner and saw there was on the cushion a thin, charred outline of what had once been his father.

Fenster Loomis, already insane, had in a matter of hours lost his girlfriend, his favorite teacher, and his beloved father to horrific violence and death. He never recovered from the trauma and was institutionalized for his own good. There he remained for twenty years. Upon release, the first thing he did, even before going home to his mother, who he had not seen since he was nine years old, was visit the old cemetery, where all the trouble had begun. The shadow of despair seemed still to hang over the place, although it had in fact been paved over and converted into a parking lot for a 7-Eleven store. Shrugging, Fenster walked the half mile to his former home. What he found there surprised him.

His mother, Helen, had remarried – to another woman – and Fenster, whose awareness of LGBTQ issues had been impeded by the two decades in the state hospital, could not come to grips with her decision to wed “Barb.” Helen gave Fenster a warm, if awkward, reception, hugging him fiercely. He met his new stepmom, but they had little to say to one another.

“Your old room is there for you, Baby,” Mom told him through tears of joy. As Fenster shuffled down the hall to his room, he eavesdropped on Helen and Barb:

“I swear, Helen, this isn’t what I bargained for five years ago when we were married. I think he’s not too tightly wrapped. Did you see the way he stared at me? It was creepy! I’m afraid. I think he’s dangerous.”

“He’s my only child, Barb,” said Helen. She had lived alone for years before she had met her wife and desperately didn’t want to lose her. “Give Fen a chance,” she implored. “Your birthday is next Friday, on July 3rd. Fen will help celebrate it. Be patient. Just through the month… okay?” At length, Barb grudgingly agreed.

When Friday rolled around, Barb’s misgivings hadn’t changed, although Fen tried to reach her. At the party, he even handed her a gift he’d wrapped in his own inimitable way. She was taken aback.

“Oh, Fen,” she said. “You didn’t have to buy me a present.”

“It’s a bracelet,” he told her. “Mom said when you were married, you never exchanged rings.” She opened the package.

“It’s beautiful,” she managed, a little guiltily. “Where did you find it,” she asked, slipping it around her wrist.

“I bought it at a Resellit shop,” he told her, smiling.

HOW MY FAMILY SURVIVES:

ON HUMAN ADAPTATION TO HARSH HABITATS



If you’ve imagined

vast sandy ruins

you should intuit

there are Bedouins.

And icy wastelands

would seem to imply

there are Inuit

who would there reside.



BORN FOR TWILIGHT



Today’s worlds lose their edge.

Sharp light softens with age.

Silhouettes turn vague.

Colorshapes gray to sludge.

Horizon slides to sky.

I was born for twilight.

My seven senses smudge.



THE SILENCE MAY BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE NOISE: AN ILLUSTRATION






























--Duane Vorhees





FOR LOVE



You wanted to share my life;

time kept you from my past; the future hasn't come yet;

today is just for laughs.

Sometimes I know i bored you,

and other times ignored you.

You know how I felt toward you.

But to say I wanted no one but you would not be true.

I auditioned my actors, and you weren't in the cast.

Fitting out my clipper life replaced you with a mast.

You know that I adored you.

But once I had explored you

I just could not afford you.

Many a man has decayed and gone to bugs – but not for love.



THE BEAST



And now who's going to drool at your beauty?

Who's going to bark through the night?

Who's going to bury

his bone for you today?

and howl for your exclusive delight?



My head has become a slow white dove--

no match, I'm afraid,

for the swiftsweet addersss of your fingersss.

Just a flikflik of the tongue,

one whiplash embrace--

and

already

the rich delicious poison

invades my heart.



Imagine our bodies in braille,

fingertongues perusing,

teasing out nuances,

weighing every significance.

We turn over

sheet after sheet.

Each climax foreshadowed,

we read ourselves to sleep.



I love your body's several smiles

as I press my name on all your mouths.

I love the way your body smiles

in some of your most surprising places.

I love the several smiles your body hides.

I love the hidden ways your body smiles for me,

The Easter Egg Hunt of your passion. The gift at your Christmas Tree.



No music's only one finger on one string.

The ocean wants a moon to make a tide.

Left foot needs right to create a stride.

And flight requires flow and wing.

It all makes a kind of bawdy sense:

Selfish soliloquy, no substance.



sticky nights

with a peppermintcheeked wonderchild

gumdrop breasts and licorice thighs

and acres of sugar cube smile

(even sweets will turn sour

if left for overnight;

too many lonely long hours

between the passion and delight)

and now who's going to drool at your beauty?



Who's going to bark through the night?

Who's going to to bury his bone for you today

and howl for your exclusive delight?



I've had my wine,

my kiss and my cock,

my garden and my trial.



I've got my thorns,

my thief and my hill,

my boulder and my style.



Where are my ring,

my fief and my rod,

my halo and my choir?



...

NATURAL STORIES

The gilded wings of sparrowhawks
Shade the stone of Solstice Canyon.
The birdsong of warblers
Carves trails to the waters
Beyond the flowing creek.

Cracked rock wandering past trees;
Brick huts built against the terrain, savoring
The privilege of seldom being seen.
This nonhuman nature wields a beauty
Caught and torn apart in human throats.

God forges peace above war and death,
Screaming silence over hoarse white noise.
–– Stillness stretches here, across rosewater.
But the story catches in my throat.
Let worthy fables whisper tired truths.


ET is a current student who has been writing as a hobby for several years. Outside of writing, ET loves to volunteer, play with his dogs, kick around a soccer ball, and eat tasty foods.

That Dog




He still regularly

Looks at photos 

Of London

On his phone,

He could be anywhere

When he does this,

That dog was

Thirteen pounds

Of amazing.




Taylor Dibbert is a writer, journalist, and poet in Washington, DC. “London,” his second full-length poetry collection, is due out in March.