TWO POEMS by JESSICA DALY
HE LIKES POEMS ABOUT NOTHING
i’m so apprehensive today i think the world might end. it’s raining hard enough.
i’m shaking with veins of black espresso while my organs suck internally against my skin, looking for traces of water. the embarrassing desperation of the human condition.
i order an eleven am drink that has no home in my empty stomach. it cuts rivers past the forgotten produce of my fleshy beating heart.
I Used to Fuck With a Ouija Board
tonight music is bland and lyrics desolate and inapplicable rot the inside of my brain, the feeble earthy maggots inside begging for reprise from another psychotic strain of sound. it’s all just words strained against recycled melodies and i have enough dialogue hastily scripted on the walls of my skull, blackened lettering in the forgotten wall of a cave, symbols and love letters and primal need forgotten inside a world that forgot how to read it.
tonight i will worry about tomorrow and tomorrow i will worry about tonight. time is so mixed in the past it no longer feels linear, each hour revealing a red curtain and behind that curtain another grieving reflection in the mirror with past inanities flashing in the harshly dilated pupils of my eyes.
it’s all just things. nothing tangible or physical in my hands. a haunting bewitched and magnified by obsession. my friend told me she had a dream about the ghost in my childhood home. i didn’t tell her we could describe it the exact same way.
Jessica Daly (she/her) is a horror and prose writer from Vancouver, Canada. Her work has appeared previously in Rough Cut Press, the Horror Zine Magazine, Suspense Magazine, and Artists Syndicate. Jessica has work forthcoming in Misery Tourism.