The Polite Bride
(Eleanor Nellie Vance--Eleanor Crain)
Eleanor gave birth in
the dark, ectoplasm
spattering the walls. Her lust for Hill House’s
brick, symmetry and
song, her maenad’s
striptease for a patient
Arthur
porcelain body bleached
with white
Starved for bloodless
phantasms,
a ghost’s flight, stuttering, dizzy,
caught
Eleanor flagged down any
spirit that would
have her, stuffing a
monkey’s paw down
her shirt before
attending a demon’s
purity ball, hoping her
dark raisin eyes
would be grateful and
still
Scaly heaves
of an inverse
psalmist’s
crawling limbo
as a quick injection or cure
her face in suspense
rae
maybe to the tinfoil
birds of Teske’s spirit
photographs
picked by tinfoil birds
in the Elysian fields.
She would
grow strong
on the harvested spirit,
the order of
stilled breath
forgetful fields
Crane would
whisper
a curse in her ear
something different with
gears spinning
as her music box, the
pearl and pink
embroidered panels, her
song
Come home, Eleanor
where the loveless
nocturnal
fortunes
are drawn
fed to the shade
she parts in
oblivion's
soupy fugue
nightingale’s
song
a dim recall, the
house’s
unseen suitors in
thrall
to a mysterious hunger.
Elegy for Jess Tapper
Before the skies began
to fall, I was told of nature’s
latest cruelty: your
disappearance. I am glad you
aren't animate for
this plague borne of inattention.
But this is no time
for trouble, no time to double on trouble.
A madcap from some
submarinal lake in Lewis Carroll,
a Blakean sincerity
searing through all you wrote, all you did.
Would this wordsmith
firebrand choose to be himself once more?
Choose his own storm,
the fitful alterations of his rain,
each drop a small
planet weighed on and burnt
by a savage sun? And
this from some foreign mist,
the why not quite
known but the weather severe.
Driven but uncounted
by commerce, a primordial
undestroyer of the
world, filing poetic kernels by humble rivers.
But this is no time
for trouble, of course: no time to double
on a least bit more
trouble. Ending in circumstances
modest and hidden,
possessed of a gratitude always abiding,
your terrible energy
knowing itself to have a stronghold
in the verb's
alchemy. What do they call us in French, or English?
How are we seen? Lunar
phantoms, chimerical atom spills,
monks without cells;
I’ll say it, though you never did.
You are the archetypal
face a writer can incarnate,
and have
uncomplainingly earned this to wear.
You were an independent artist, and this is singular.
John Thomas Allen is a 38 year old from Albany, NY. He enjoys all forms of poetry, especially the highly speculative and and what allows for the fullest freedom of expression. Without this ability to choose how something is expressed, the art becomes a chore to him. Charles Wright, Peter O Leary, and Kristin Prevallet are some of his favorite contemporary poets. He was recently nominated for the Best of the Net by Sundress Academy For the Arts, and won the James Tate Prize in 2019. His favorite character in literature is Enoch from Flannery O Connor’s Wise Blood. His work has been featured in SuRvision, The Cimarron Review, Peculiar Mormyrid, Spectral Realms, and Synchronized Chaos.
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