POETRY BY LOUISE WORTHINGTON

Louise Worthington writes about the complexity and the darker side of the human heart in the genres of horror and psychological thrillers. Many of her novels explore motherhood, mental health disorders, revenge and family. Her tales are imbued with strong emotional themes and atmospheric settings with strong female characters and multi-layered plots. She is at her most poetic describing the dark and disturbing.

Her latest novel is Doctor Glass and her collection of poetry and flash fiction is Stained Glass Lives.

You can learn more about Louise here:
https://louiseworthington.co.uk

GHOST BREATH

He lives like a squatter in my house.
Without long fair strands of hair
On the cushions, I couldn’t tell
He is my son.
He grows taller, feathered, wilder,
Me, smaller, quieter
A mouse to a hunter, slow-cooked.
Calls me pulp or flotsam
Sick fortune-teller
Store-worker stock-piling mistakes,
While I smell human disaster
See a slow moving car crash with a demon behind the wheel,
Feel winter in my pale nightdress when he leaves the house
Carting attitude like a rifle.

He returns in the small hours
Me, stuck in a silent movie,
While he shouts, “Fuck you!”
Says it like the words are a succulent peach
Sucked and swallowed every millimeter of flesh
Until there’s just the stone left
And the peach juice on his chin
Summoning obscenities like insects into the trap of his mouth.
I think stones are sewn inside him
He feels no pain
Knows not how it is to hurt.
His burning eyes make me remember a younger me.
When I die
He is my legacy, my ghost breath,
The sediment of a life—
A mirror.

STAY DEAD

This night is afterbirth splayed up the walls of a berth.
Anchor chains of my broken heart chink.
Plucking at the net curtain of my eye-lashes
A sick longing
Till the scar of his voice speaks my name
Exhales over the sound of salty waves
Poking a paper-thin finger into a weeping wound
Cleaning it with a dead tongue.

My body is a desolate ocean
Soon to be traversed
No gentle voyage
He smells of unspoken rituals.
Fear sits in my stomach like obsidian
Rubbing till they splinter
Protrude as black icicles from my sternum.

Clara, dear Clara.
Lower your eyelids on the night
Undo the undoing
I will make you still.
Let me embrace you tightly
So your chilled blood will turn to ice.
Let me in.

Splintering sound
Oh, the dead wood of his voice.
A stark wooing
A raven not a dove
Settling like morning mist
Cataracts in the eyes of a new lyric
Eyeballing the suffering of a haunted existence.

Tapping, tapping, scratching at the cabin door like a cat’s claws
His pleas slip through the wooden cracks
Wrap themselves on the ceiling
Between my breasts.

Let me in, Clara.
Lower your eyelids
There are new horizons with me
Don’t be afraid to be weak.

He feeds a sick hunger
Navigates my loneliness
Baits the salty air
A presence of sour ambrosia
Tickling emptiness
Stroking desire for touch at this midnight hour
A deathly rebirth to sleep with him.

I wish for or the walls to flicker, the ceiling to fall and show compassion.
His words are vines
Suspending my limbs from the ceiling
Dressing the unmade bed in honeydew and lice.

Surrender, dear Clara
Let me stroke the trembling rhyme of your face,
Forbid I am ignored
Heal the broken wings of your hips
I’ll send the sorrow away.

His eyes seek my flesh like a prayer and a sin;
A wedding of the rabid and unfed.
His spirit is my lover tonight fat in my veins,
Tapping on my skull
Whispering in my ear
The paralysis,
The numbness, is complete:
A perfect, glistening icicle.

The whitest flesh on the blackest of nights.
Into perilous gloom of no return
From the clutch of his groping fingers
And melancholy pulse
Reborn
Picasso’s child in the shattered mirror of the sea.