POETRY BY DANIEL APPLEBY
Daniel Appleby is an autistic, bass-playing writer and poet from the UK. He has been published in Breaking the Static: A Chapter House Anthology, CPW Graduate Anthology 2025, Four Tulips Publishing, Kinpaurak, and Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit’s Superfan Wrestling Zine Issue Two.
Most days, Daniel is either watching horror movies, playing video games, or reading TMNT comics, all while accompanied by his pet cat, Muffin. You can find him on Instagram at @danie_lappleby
BEKSIŃSKI
What rotting floor disrupts
The serenity? Such succulent
Tumors only infuse the
Rumors that, yes, we are
All dying. A flesh statue was
Made for you, a tube, within
Its rusting industrial lawns.
A clean, white, leafless forest lies
Beneath the ground, a mist
Infects the minds of those around
Till the eventual decline of
Ribs and blood. Wires and strings.
There is no difference between.
The sky is fallen steel, melting
Away from the lukewarm heat,
And a temple of grey meat
Is where we lie and consume
The everlasting sorrow of
The past retreat. When the present
Finally decays the future, and oh
My son, it is getting closer and
Closer. I will sink with you,
To rise and sing a melancholic
Genocide.
THE MIDNIGHT MAN
Your arrival was made noticeable by the broken glass.
Shattered within a circle of salt, my fingernails rot
before your sight.
A whisper of purple death infects the domestic manifold.
Pagan choirs, silent crows, intermediate meditation, desperate woes.
Soft eyeless face, let me kiss a black star.
I wait for the void to make me whole. Reality has left me cold,
alone, all the heartache and for what? Amalgamations of skin
from a homeless man’s face forms a world
riddled with sorrow and fear. A world for us. A world for you.
A candle, blood, sinking dread, and a naked self.
Please, take me with you, silent man, I wish to be dead.
DARKNESS HAS A NAME AND IT’S NOT TIFFANY
A simple job is only simple if you’re expecting the gun to be empty.
In that case, you substitute the inconvenience for a wire. I’m a reasonable
man, however, and I won’t judge a fair deal when it’s on the table. Right now,
between a crying insurance man and his trophy wife, I might give him the benefit
of the doubt. By horizons, rain leaks through windows, acid in particular, sizzling
sanded brick. A 1940 radio plays a heavy metal distortion of The Ink Spots, lending
the space well to a dark carnivalesque. This man I’ve come for summoned me
out of his own volition. To remove himself from a wench he’d called “Tiffany.”
Poor Tiffany…
I recognize her innocent face since childhood: buttercup, floral princess, underneath
a decaying tree, Tennessee wilderness, sun-bleached Shepherd wearing a straw hat,
digging grass till a certain black rose from an eclipsed, blood moon, pouring vulnerabilities
down towards us, smothering me first, and you last. I missed you. Oh, so dearly. And
this is what you’ve become? We practiced in the woods daily, till the ground beneath our
feet cracked and burned a new scape. What’s Hell? Asbestos, my dear, nothing but asbestos.
Skyscrapers are antennas, roads are mazes of dead nature, Wendigos pile and contribute
to a mountain of humanity's unborn fetuses, left to become statistics for another useless
war. And the air is raining asbestos. I’m back. You’re not dead. Oh, Tiffany, if I had
a thousand ways so you wouldn’t see me like this, I’d combine them into one slushie
and drink it till I wee. Do better next time, my dear (the car crash didn’t occur for a reason,
let me go). I’ll meet you again eventually, I’m sure.
KNIFE
She sure knew how to handle it.
Leather sheath, latex gloves,
white apron, no strings attached.
Dragging it across my thigh, towards
my Achilles tendon, I look at her and smile.
Do it. A single pierce of the flesh, a scream
in ecstasy. Now everything made so much sense.