Terrors of Today – Denise Dumars

The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised, and Neither Is the Effect of the Hurricane on Cuba by Denise Dumars Auctober Apocalypto   The blossoms are red and the cat is white but ashes darken his fur (what do they say of cats after dark?)  A deep grey-purple has boiled the sky It’s a time of pumpkin spice death a gas mask and a hazmat suit    My mother wakes and cannot breathe the EMT truck is as red as hibiscus Have you any pumpkin spice pan de muertos? Do the teeth of the dead still gnash?   (Will the white…

Terrors of Today: Jamal Hodge

Dinner for One Reddened spoons. Napkins of aging skin. A table for none where once pumped a hopeful heart. Foolish from the start the refreshing glass of toil-laden piss, ripened to this- Vacant meal of me, mournful dish,  served raw, upon mirrored plates. -- From Jamal Hodge's upcoming book, I'm Not A Good Person, I'm A New Yorker.  Author's Statement: My poem Dinner For One takes the symbolic activity of togetherness (A dinner at a table) and turns it into a place of loneliness and horror. The grim end result of preparing a meal of yourself within your selfish choices, that…

Terrors of Today: L Marie Wood

Inside Out by L. Marie Wood Inside out what’s inside bared to the air tender to the touch red and slick hothouse musk. Voice loud my mind Loud in the sky Loud  Because it can be Private for me but I’m flayed for the world to see. Open cavity. Open skull. Open mind. Open shell. A husk to be filled with your words your thoughts your wants your desires you you you alone you whole you bold. Of me there’s no consequence. Of me there’s no gain. All taken with the edge of the blade lain to cut to sever,…

Terrors of Today: Angela Yuriko Smith

Newsfast: Menu for the Machine by Angela Yuriko Smith Thoughts are deadly gossamer, silvery filaments breaching the vacant void to reach me. Dangers tremble along my neural networks, each tentative vibration a warning that there is a ghost in the machine, a viral bug, a broken code. I see it in the clouds, weighted low with toxins. I taste it in the dew, flavored gray, wilting skin and organs from within. Language spewed to skew cellular structures, warping what began as holy into what ends in despair and disrepair. It takes one thought to derail a system, one word to…

Terrors of Today: Modern Horror Poetry

Terrors of Today: Modern Horror Poetry It’s been 180 years since Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Raven,” the poem that turned him into an overnight success, only four years before his life was tragically cut short at just forty years of age. The official cause of death was "congestion of the brain,” sometimes used as a euphemism for alcoholism-related mortality of the era. In honor of this morbid Bostonian, we honor Dark Poetry Day on the anniversary of his death (October 7) rather than his birthday.  He is one in a long list of dark poets, from Phyllis Wheatley, William…