The August First Selected Poet is Ghia Vitale

Please feel free to email Ghia. at: ghia.alexandra.vitale@gmail.com

CADAVERINE WINE

I’d rather drink formaldehyde than milk.
(It’s true.)

Heeding whatever thunderous hymns manage to trespass,
The confines of my stomach-chamber,
Embalms sanity—
A miniscule price to pay for the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I’d rather imbibe a glass or ten of cadaverine wine,
Of artificial ambrosia,
(available at a store near you),
And D
E
C
A
Y into a state of sweet nothingness,
As the marrow of life dissolves from my bones,
From mundane earth to stardust,
Filling not only an hourglass, but also the heavens,
With a lifetime worth of celestial jewels and traumatic projections.

I’d rather drink formaldehyde than milk.
(Wouldn’t you?)

CONCUBINE PRIESTESS

Constellated beer bottle shards,
Cast forth faint, iridescent shine.
Silver mounds of cremated cards,
Entomb a lovelorn valentine.
If spectral winds divulge a name—
Lettered, lyrical, yours or mine,
Send no regards,
Bury all shame,
Inside a phantom concubine.

Is she a daughter or a wife?
Machete, but her only knife?
Her vagrant soul meanders earth,
As you return to humdrum life,
Satiated with carnal sin,
Darksome muses, fettered within.
Resumed, confessed, you resume mirth,
Barbed wire crux, she bares your strife.

Yet morals promptly paralyze,
Descend into depravity,
Held captive by Medusa’s eyes,
You surrender unto pity.
Before a fascist Godde, you knelt,
Beseeching each smoldering welt.
You languish her sapidity,
While she traces veins of city,
Your bastard truths, held underbelt,
A macrocosmic dream, unfelt.
Cadaverous pallor, opium lips—
From her kiss, lackluster blood drips.

JANE DOE

Then there it was—your silhouette,
Reaping bruised orchids, feeding crows—
Have they unearthed the bodies yet?

I thought I’d known before we met,
Where the deadliest nightshade grows,
Then there it was—your silhouette.

Saturnine fog veiled your secret:
A valley where lilies repose.
Have they unearthed the bodies yet?

Smoke signaled a last cigarette.
The tavern was about to close,
Then there it was—your silhouette.

Now, pearls of ambrosial scarlet,
Saturate each cancerous rose—
Have they unearthed the bodies yet?

Who ever dreamed some prized violet
would flourish where I decompose?
Then there it was—your silhouette.
Have they unearthed the bodies yet?

Ghia Vitale is a writer and student from Long Island. She recently graduated from Purchase College with a bachelor’s degree in literature and minors in psychology, sociology and gender studies. Her senior year was devoted to academic research in pertinence to occultism in the poetry of Lord Byron and Edgar Allan Poe. Although she has won some awards for poetry in the past, The Horror Zine is the first publication in which her poetry is featured. Currently, she writes freelance articles about occult studies, feminism and other matters that are relevant to social change.