Flowers rot in my hands, on the banks of Charon.

My melody of asp bite is the strangest marriage bed.

A hiss, a cadence, of bones dancing to Stygian flow.

But I feel at home here, amongst asphodel and shades.

True, Orpheus played the lyre like the world would never

fade away, but nothing escapes death, not brides, not bones.

Even, after millennia, bones can burn.  To struggle against

the Maenads when frenzied vice grips the Earth’s harrows?

Nothing changes.  All changes.  Rot is just another breath of life.

I say rivers only run downhill.

I say fungus blossoms in dregs of wine.

And when Orpheus looked back to see my blue flesh, to kiss

my lips of maggots, I trembled like a cedar in autumn wind.

Stand strong, I urged myself, but dust calls to dust, and I

slipped like golden mud through his arms, putrefaction and

the worms…

We lasted awhile
only as the times apart
became longer

and you always asked
about others
in the interim
and of course
I said never

look me in the eye
you said
and I did

then we’d go to bed
for a murderous fuck
and afterward sleep bruised
and even bloody

awaken stiff with scabs
with eyes shining
like moons in orbit

the wide eyes
of ones entranced
by a false but beautiful idol

©2019 Brian Rihlmann

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Brian Rihlmann was born in NJ, and currently lives in Reno, NV. He writes mostly semi autobiographical, confessional free verse. Folk poetry…for folks. He has been published in The Rye Whiskey Review, Cajun Mutt Press, Alien Buddha Zine, Synchronized Chaos, Madness Muse Press and The American Journal Of Poetry.

“Like a drum from above,

it was the thunder of my heart

that kept me alive and alert.”

It was the thunder that kept me awake. Synapses firing, like lightning in the night, illuminating the fog of dark gray, cotton-candy clouds. Thoughts springing to life before disappearing in an instant, only to fire yet again with another string of words flash behind my eyes and whisper to me. Those are my demons, my monsters, my battle cries. Those are the rumblings, the crackles in my ears. That is the constant reminder that I’m still alive. These thoughts, they keep me sharp. They keep me alert. I stay alive. And that thunder that rolls by. That’s the sound of my heart, refusing to submit.

Sarah Doughty is the tingling wonder-voice behind Heartstring Eulogies. The Silence Between Moonbeams, her poetry chapbook, and her acclaimed novels and…

Touch does not sit in the veins of a petal,

Does not wilt when the bloom of spring

Withers away. It can’t be pruned,

It does not decompose with the dead and discarded

To become a new whole.

Woman is not a flower. A flower

Is only beautiful for the season. Groomed,

Clipped, arranged, until the water

Turns brown and the pollen turns

Sickly and it’s

Hidden amongst the garbage, ugly.

Woman is a root. What grows from her

May pass but she is there, in the dirt,

Taking hold of the earth, taking hold

Of life to say, “What may pass

Can be regrown.” Touch

Is there, in the roots.

The boy who kissed me

In the courtyard to show

How easy it was

To break me.

The man who pushed me

To the ground outside my bedroom door,

His moon eyes black and sizzling

Like an empty frying…

Until the day I die, I’ll never forget them glassy, unblinking eyes.

You know, I’d made that gris-gris—what you all call a Voodoo Doll— myself.  Mawmaw taught me how when I was a kid back in Bayou Lafourche.  She said that since we were direct descendants of Marie Laveau, it was our legacy.  My mama died giving birth to me, so Mamaw was the only one left to teach me.

“Ma chère petite-fille, you have to know,” she said.

Shoot, Mamaw didn’t have to twist my arm! Even then, I realized the benefit of such a skill.

Daddy flipped when he found out. Pooyie, it was bad!

That’s when we moved up to Gentilly and I never did see Mamaw again.

Sonovabitch, I still miss her.

It was damn lucky for all of us (  okay, me) that there’d been enough time for her to teach me before I had to go.

Anyway…