zine
roach
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Sara Tantlinger

The October Editor's Pick Poet is Sara Tantlinger

Please feel free to email Sara at:

saratantlinger@gmail.com

Sara

HEART ROACHES

Keep the love ghost
nameless,
keep her haunting
tombs
like forgotten soldiers

Inside her palace body
I set tiny roaches free
infesting the pale
oval of her face
infesting my bloodstream

The roaches scatter inside
sick hearts, crunching
like pebbled death
beneath shadowed footsteps

Keep the love ghost
waiting,
keep her satiated,
lusting
for veins and lungs

The roaches steal my organs
carry blood away
stitch my ghost girl together
with the meat, tissue, muscle of me

I am the one who took
her silver moonlight life
in the first place,
I am the one who kept
her nameless in my cemetery

SOIL AND ASH

“I want to inhale you,”
he says,
then gives me back
to the earth

I am his compost, recycled
disintegrated
he plants soil over my ashes
grows a sapling
oak, I think

I grow,
upupup
and he breathes in
consumes me
forever his oxygen

I am not wasted
instead suspended
within the dust
of his dreams

eternally alive
renewed
saved from the world’s filth
I am his nourishment

and forever I grow here
soil and ash

EPOCH OF ISLAND MIRAGES

the hourglass bursts
glass shreds skin
decorates sand with blood

somewhere there’s a beach
white sand, clear water
not a muscle moves
away from that coast,
not a ghost haunts
those frozen beachgoers

because radiant sun sizzles
down, burns through
atmospheric time

shattered and jagged
hourglass pieces shove
shards down my throat
purge life away before
my expiration date,
decorate the sand with blood

not a muscle moves
away from that coast,
I disintegrate into the shore

Sara Tantlinger resides outside of Pittsburgh on a hill in the woods. She is the author of Love For Slaughter and The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes, both released with Strangehouse Books. She is a poetry editor for the Oddville Press, a graduate of Seton Hill’s MFA program, a member of the SFPA, and an active member of the HWA. She embraces all things strange and can be found lurking in graveyards or on Twitter @SaraJane524 and at saratantlinger.com