Bloodbound
by Harris Coverley
A most usual task:
A portrait fair and quick
Done with the airbrush
A grand old house
Brown and tall
Nestled in turquoise hedges
That exquisite young lady
Who took me upstairs
To a loft full of minor
masterpieces
Revealing my medium
To glaze upon the canvas bare—
Her own
blood!
What could I do?
My machine was ready
And my belly almost empty
I inserted the tube into her
wrist
Thin and pallid as it already
was
And sat her opposite my easel
Plasma deep and rich and fresh
Oxidising in its journey
From vein-bound royal blue
The outline of her precious face
Down to her swan-like neck
And across her slender shoulders
Drying as brown as the house’s
bricks
Runnings smoothed with a
millimetre brush
Abstract made into visage naturale
Taking a break for both to rest
She struggling ‘round to see my
efforts—
“It’s lovely!” declared with
weakened tongue
Then back
to work!
The final strands of red to
brown
The intricate fiddling of a
perfectionist
“Done my lady!” proudly exclaimed
Yet exclaimed to a shrivelled
corpse
Propped up in her chair with
widest grin
Hung on the wall by my own hand
In that big and silent house
I closed the grand door after me
Leaving up within that loft:
Two smiling ladies
One of blood and one bereft
A day’s good work
For a month’s sustenance
The artist’s living.
Along with previously in Yellow Mama, Harris Coverley has had verse published in California
Quarterly, Star*Line, Spectral Realms, Scifaikuest, Polu
Texni, Silver Blade, The Crank, Songs of
Eretz Poetry Review, Altered Reality Magazine, Apocalypse
Confidential, Tigershark, Corvus Review, View
From Atlantis, and many others. He lives in Manchester, England.
Cindy Rosmus originally
hails from the Ironbound section of Newark, NJ, once voted the “unfriendliest city on the planet.” She talks like
Anybodys from West Side Story and everybody from Saturday Night
Fever. Her noir/horror/bizarro stories have been published in the coolest places, such as Shotgun Honey; Megazine; Dark
Dossier; The Rye Whiskey Review, Under the Boardwalk, and Rock and a Hard Place. She
is the editor/art director of Yellow Mama and the art director of Black Petals. She’s published
seven collections of short stories. Cindy is a Gemini, a Christian, and an animal rights advocate. She has
recently branched out into photo illustration, under the guidance and mentoring of Ann Marie Rhiel.
