April is National Poetry Month and because I write, read, and love poetry, I’m featuring poetry on my site this month! You’ll find poetry, articles, reviews, and more so stop by often. Yesterday, Bram Stoker Award winning poet Marge Simon brought us a wonderful article called “Illumination Dark Poetry” with various examples of her poetry, which you can find here.
Today, please enjoy some samples from Bram Stoker Award winning dynamo, Stephanie Wytovich. I dare you not to feel.
Thanks for sharing with us, Stephanie!
Surgical Fantasies of the Past Ten years
Originally Published in Yes, Poetry
I tattoo incision lines on my stomach,
dream about surgically removing my ugliness.
At sixteen, the girls put laxatives in my peppermint tea,
laughed at me in the mirror when I tried to scream away my calories.
At 26, I cried in the shower when my skin didn’t fall off,
vomited the memories of my ex telling me I was diseased.
Inside, my lungs are a crawl space filled with candy wrappers,
my ribs broken from too many bathroom breaks ending in blood.
There are 206 bones in the human body,
Tell me, how many are in a monster?
____
Emergency Masturbation Fantasy
Originally Published in Sheet Music to My Acoustic Nightmare
I masturbate to an empty chair
My hand moving up and down
like yours never did
I try to see your face
Scream your name
But I can’t
And I wonder if you exist
If my memories are from photographs of people I never met
Whose stories I don’t know
I climax to your eyes
Taste the saliva on your lips
But I don’t
Because you’re an empty chair
And my box is broken
Like yours never was
I should stop blaming myself
Quit bleeding for sport
But I won’t.
___
Post-Traumatic Spiders
Originally Published in Sheet Music to My Acoustic Nightmare
My doctor scribbled in her notepad,
“What do you want to talk about today?”
I was already crying
I ate all the cough drops on the table when she wasn’t looking
Her dog was asleep on my foot
I just left my one-night stand in the parking lot.
Frustration wore on her face like the foundation she forgot to wear
“Are the nightmares back?”
I spun my ring around my thumb
I thought about how you said I wore too much jewelry
I tongued the scar on the inside of my cheek
The tarantulas are everywhere.
Her right foot tapped against the carpeted floor
“You know it’s okay, right? That none of this is your fault?”
I didn’t believe her
I felt its legs crawling up my shoulder
I watched it watch me.
I could have stopped it. I could have said no.
Fifty minutes passed like fifty seconds
“Same time again next Wednesday?
I nodded my head
I picked the spider off my cheek
I swallowed the web it had spun around my mouth
The silk tasted like semen and blood.
Stephanie M. Wytovich, Biography –
Stephanie M. Wytovich is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her work has been showcased in numerous anthologies such as Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, Fantastic Tales of Terror, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror: Volume 2, The Best Horror of the Year: Volume 8, as well as many others.
Wytovich is the Poetry Editor for Raw Dog Screaming Press, an adjunct at Western Connecticut State University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Point Park University, and a mentor with Crystal Lake Publishing. She is a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, an active member of the Horror Writers Association, and a graduate of Seton Hill University’s MFA program for Writing Popular Fiction.
Her Bram Stoker Award-winning poetry collection, Brothel, earned a home with Raw Dog Screaming Press alongside Hysteria: A Collection of Madness, Mourning Jewelry, An Exorcism of Angels, and Sheet Music to My Acoustic Nightmare. Her debut novel, The Eighth, is published with Dark Regions Press.
Follow Wytovich on her blog and on twitter @SWytovich.
Sheet Music to My Acoustic Nightmare is her most recent collection. Read about it here!
Sheet Music to My Acoustic Nightmare, Info –
Roll the windows down, wipe the blood off your cheek, and turn the music up. Sheet Music to My Acoustic Nightmare by Stephanie M. Wytovich is a collection spattered with dirt and blood, sage and corpses. The poems inside are confessionals and dirges, their stories the careful banter of ghosts and sinners over tequila at the bar.
These pages hold the lyrics to the beautiful grotesque that Wytovich is known for, but here she writes with a raw honesty that we haven’t seen from her before. This new direction takes readers to hospital rooms and death beds, shows the mask that was skinned off her face time and time again. There’s a brutality to her lines that cuts with the same knife she fantasized about it, her blood and tears mixed in with stanzas as she talks about suicide and abuse, heartbreak and falling in love.
Written during a time when the road was her home, these poems were sung under the stars and screamed in the woods, carved into trees. They are broken bottles and cigarette butts, stale coffee and smeared lipstick, each its own warning, a tale of caution.
Listen to them carefully.
They very well might save your life.
Find it on GoodReads to Add or Buy.
Stop back tomorrow for a post from Sara Tantlinger. Then, join us next week when we highlight a bunch more wonderful poetry. Have a great week!
Oh, for the HOOK of a BOOK! 