The May Editor's Pick Poet is Donna Dallas

Please feel free to email Donna at: nickidallasinc@aol.com

HOWLERS

Behind our house
in the neighbor’s backyard
next to an old white
paint-crackled shed
is a dog barking…I hear it
during the day
at night
it howls
the long sad howl
of eternal wanting
almost an ache
from some long wait
for something that never
comes
and yet it’s out there—the thing that beckons the howl
fast forward years later
slow silence has crept in
the dog
long since gone I still hear the howling pitted in me
a root that spread thickly
around a long dead moan
opened up and gaping big
as the moon
aching for the thing that was missing
that was to come
but didn’t
and yet we still cry for it

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

I hear the voices from the
womb in my head
whispers toil with me
the void is cold
ice-like
open and barren
skeptics and naysayers
step in to see
nothing comes out of it
but dust
Lying with charlatans and braggers
only to find fool’s gold
keeping their trinkets on my wrist
I fiddle through dead space
and go it alone
Speaking in tongues
I drift with my traveling tomb
there is nothing in my belly
yet I feel a ball rounding ever so slightly
Tis nothing
just the expanding
rhetoric seeping from the womb
that only exists in my head

SPECTOR

When we were bored of staring into sockets
and you popped while I inhaled
I asked you to open up my chest…roll my skin back like a sardine can
dig under my ribs with your staff and try to understand/make sense of
all the nuts and bolts…the malfunctions
you were perplexed
maybe stunned
but you were already on E…and I wasn’t quite there yet
I didn’t want the elephant graveyard
you waltzed there unaccompanied
while I watched from the doorway
until you were just a mist evaporating
under a blood sun rising
all this through a keyhole
when we lay lazy
and free from sin

Donna Dallas has two voices inside of her. One is the voice of reason, calm and consistent. The other is the voice of fantasy and macabre with a stubbornly wild imagination. When the two voices cross over and greet, well, we have what is called a mind-carnival, where the ground opens up and there are angels and imps and everything in between that can shatter, as well as birth life to paper. At the musing point, she lays confessions, dreams and wishes down and calls it as she had seen it—or wanted to see it. Whether it be a vision or a real event, this all folds into the telling of the story, her story perhaps, or someone else’s. She leaves it up to you to decipher what is your piece and what is hers. 

When she is not jaunting to the underworld of words, Donna is traveling, living and breathing and anything she sees or feels will be transposed onto paper, so beware…she wants to write everything. When she is not traveling the globe or writing all your shit, she is balls to the wall working and raising a family, which is the most humbling of responsibilities. When she is not scorned, she is published, thankfully in The Horror Zine as well as Anti-Heroin Chic, Thirteen Myna Birds, Red Fez, The Opiate and Quail Bell Magazine, and many others.