NUMBER 1073

by John Grey

The house is old and infected

with churlish darkness,

the eyes of the grave,

the dusty smell of malevolence.

In even the emptiest of rooms,

a presence pricks the skin like needles.

And, when it’s gray and damp outside,

old despair seeps tears from every ceiling.

So many have dwelt within these walls,

the cruel, the evil, the unrepentant,

a diabolical den of debauched lives

without the prospect of heaven.

Even sleep is morbid restlessness,

a wearying collision of dream and haunting.

The moans from within, without,

keep all four posters of the bed awake.

John Grey is an Australian poet, U.S. resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly, and Tenth Muse. Latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert, and Memory Outside the Head, are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa, and Shot Glass Journal.

Her creative efforts have been nominated once for The Best of the Net in poetry, once for The Best of the Net in art, three times for the Pushcart Prize in Literature for poetry, once for the Pushcart Prize in Literature for fiction, once for the Million Writers Award for fiction, and once for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. To boot, Hannah’s had more than forty-five books published and has served as an editor for several literary journals.

Check out her latest short fiction collection, An Orbit of Chairs:

https://www.amazon.com/Orbit-Chairs-KJ-Hannah-Greenberg/dp/B0CWMMM73T

 Within its pages are two tales originally published at Yellow Mama: "Alive Another Day" and "Light Notes."