OCTOBER 31

by Tricia Knoll

Photo by Nathaniel Kelly at Flickr.

Halloween scares her. That surprises me—

she is sixty, sexy and beautiful. Would make

a glamorous witch. Barbie’s mother. 

 

Perhaps it’s plastic skeletons two stories tall,

memories of falling in a puddle in a ballerina costume

on the way to a neighbor’s door, gauze ghosts

dangling from naked limbs, costume party

shootings. Zombie and Yorick skulls on leafy lawns. 

Or family feuds over dividing her dead 

father’s assets. Her brother’s cleaver. 

 

Or porches and lanterns doused in acrylic webs

and jack o’ lanterns whose smiles sag in mold.

TV images of fractured concrete in bombed out enclaves. 

Forty-two million tons of rubble, 36 cubic feet each ton, 

a grave takes 120 cubic feet. Flinch. The dead walk

starved, confused. Hamlet’s father’s ghost refuses

to speak. A revived corpse never asks

for a Kiss or Snickers. 

 

Maybe it’s money. Twelve billion

on starbursts, skittles, candy corn, and twix.

You could buy half an island with a fog bell

in San Francisco Bay. Climate chaos 

balloons the cost of chocolate. 

 

Days narrow. Clocks reset and whack rhythms.

Lively green folds into loam. We hear carols. 

Ads run for books of evangelical horror 

and Amish romance. Stuffed Santas 

line pharmacy shelves beside pumpkin

plastic pails of high fructose corn syrup.

Flimsy polyester dinosaur suits crawl

to landfills. Few believe in reasons

to wear masks. What am I to do? 

Write another starlight promise

poem? Light the bonfire? 

Hug her? Kiss her cheek?

Tricia Knoll has usually enjoyed the Halloween season, but not so much this year. Too much angst about election weirdness. She can't stop from thinking about all the money spent on the holiday and how much is needed in war zones. Her poetry is published in nine either full-length books or chapbooks with information at triciaknoll.com

HALLOWEEN FOR A NEW GENERATION

by Lois Leveen

Photo by Sarah Gould.

It's odd to dress up
as a Jew when you
are already a Jew
but I do. Costume
myself in calf
length skirt, bright blue
blouse, covered head. The nose
I have with me always.
At my throat, sixteen
carat  מָגֵן דָּוִד shield of David
dangling from rope
chain. I clutch prayer
book instead of purse.
Apply make up to make
a bullet hole between my eyes, another
at my heart.

When I arrive at the party
vampires and zombies
snub me. Skeletons turn
their scapulared backs.
A werewolf at the punchbowl
mutters asshole.
Undaunted by the undead
I search the crowded room for a black
kid killed in the park by a cop,
queers of color gunned down
on the dance floor, teacher
and students schooled
to death by a lone shooter, any one
of fifty-eight massacred country
music festival attendees. But not even
the Sikh slain for being
Muslim has come. You're a fright
to behold! screams
the glow-in-the-dark tshirt of the ghoul
who tells me to leave. A fright not
to be held in this house
of horrors, I step into the dark
and stormy night of America. America opens
its arms to ones like me.

Lois Leveen is old enough to remember when adults didn’t go to Halloween parties and children to go through active shooter drills in school. She is the author of the novels Juliet's Nurse (Simon and Schuster) and The Secrets of Mary Bowser (HarperCollins). Her poetry and short prose have appeared on/in Ars Medica, The Atlantic, Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, The Chicago Tribune, cloudbank, Culminate, Hawai'i Pacific Review, The Intima, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, Monkey Puzzle, The New York Times, NPR, and The Southhampton Review; one of her poems is inscribed on a hospital wall.

ON THE ALTAR

by Jacqueline Jules 

                                                                             

Evidence for the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice in the Americas— and likely in world history—has been discovered on Peru's northern coast, archaeologists tell National Geographic. More than 140 children and 200 young llamas appear to have been ritually sacrificed in an event that took place some 550 years ago on a wind-swept bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in the shadow of what was then the sprawling capital of the Chimú Empire. —Kristin Romey, National Geographic, April 26, 2018. Photograph by Gabriel Prieto.

                                                                 

The remains of children and llamas in Peru
reminds me of Abraham, how he didn’t argue
for Isaac the way he did for Sodom and Gomorrah,
how he acquiesced, traveling three days as commanded,
building an altar, binding his son.  Imagine
Isaac’s terrified eyes until an angel appears
with new instructions.

Which brings me back to the bodies in Peru,
breastbones bent to extract 140 hearts
offered to appease an angry god, demanding
what’s most precious as ultimate bribe.

Like a folktale reinvented around the globe,
sacrifice is not confined to geographic region.
From ancient times, somehow humans have believed
we have to kill to demonstrate devotion.

When the angel told Abraham to offer a ram instead,
it was more than a revelation, it was a weaning.
Spiritually, we were babies, still sucking
on our first source of sustenance.

Think of how we despaired later on,
when the Temple was destroyed and
we were told we couldn’t burn animals
anymore. What can we put on the altar now?
We cried. How do we please now?

The answer still seems to baffle us.

Jacqueline Jules is the author of the poetry chapbooks Field Trip to the Museum, Stronger Than Cleopatra, and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including TheNewVerse.News, The Rising Phoenix Review, What Rough Beast, Public Pool, and Gargoyle.

HALLOWEEN AT THE NURSING HOME

by Michael Mark

Image source: Reddit

The tombstones and zombie decorations
look more scared than scary among those
living in translucent skin, rolling their
wheelchairs with skeleton hands,
gasping in their oxygen masks.

The Grim Reaper creeps along the corridors,
behind a walker, to the costume contest,
scythe taped to his back with bloody bandages.

The bedridden plead for him not to pass them by.

No one pulls back in fright or shrieks
from anything other than pain or dementia
or to let themselves and anyone else out
there know they are, for good and bad,
still alive.


Only when the grandchildren come to trick-
or-treat in their jack-o-lantern and fairy
princess costumes do their sunken eyes
rise from their sockets and their colorless
lips tremble with fear.


Michael Mark is a hospice volunteer. His poetry has appeared in Angle Journal, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Empty Mirror, Everyday Poets, Forge Journal, Lost Coast Review, New Verse News, Petrichor Review, Scapegoat, Silver Birch Press, Red Booth Review, The thing itself, The New York Times, The Wayfarer, Work. His poetry has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize.