Poets

The kick inside. Top Story - October 2026.

I have a little friend inside He's kinda like my buddy Sharing cells it seems to me While giving cause for worry I've seen a picture of my mate

Watching Death's Door. Top Story - October 2026.

Darkened mind, disheartened find. Streaming tears, flowing fears. Sunken dreams, drunken screams. I am spiraling down this rabbit hole as I sit here waiting for death's door to open. There is no light at that door; it’s dark, a cave with no end. My eyes are bruised with nightmares—no sleep day or night. The outbursts are lonely, hurtful, and degrading. I feel forgotten, left behind.

The Amber Express. Top Story - October 2026.

I discovered this place on a guided tour, by train, where they served Soup du jour. We left the station and ventured forward. First destination, the elusive October...

One more chair. Top Story - October 2026.

The doors of this house aren’t always open But today, they are The windows rattle in the incessant wind Its whistle flies from room to room

The Bridge into Eternity. Top Story - October 2026.

Midnight opened over the crossing like a book forbidden to the living. He entered, carrying the last remnants of a life he had mistaken for his own. The phantoms waited in the distance, each one a chapter death had declined to read. Their garments stirred in the dark, and the years gathered around them like mourners at an unmarked grave. He turned toward the world he knew. The road had vanished. Only the endless passage remained, stretching through a darkness that seemed to have existed before creation. He walked. One phantom bore the sorrow of a lost love. Another held the face of his forgotten youth. A third offered the terrible sum of every hour surrendered to fear, every tenderness abandoned, every life he had been too frightened to live. The dead required no confession. Their presence alone was judgment. Farther along, a final figure waited, dressed in the blackness of the grave. He knew that figure, knew the terrible recognition of a life approaching its conclusion. It was himself, released from every illusion that had sustained him. He crossed the final stretch and waited for the world to end. The bridge continued into darkness. From the opposite distance, another traveler appeared, walking toward the phantoms with the solemn certainty of a man who had mistaken the beginning of his journey for its end.

The House October Built. Top Story - October 2026.

I'm writing from your favorite place-  can you guess where I am? The trip here was lined with all the homes I've ever  lived in, and as I walked past, the lights in each one came on. The night was crisp and unquenchable, acorns grown soft underfoot, the smell of ozone from rain in the air mingling with the char of woodsmoke. The beauty of it disguised the truth-  this all is a waiting room for loss, a lane lit with endless  nostalgia like that last, peaceful dream before the final sleep.  voices echo more here, the days winding ever shorter, coming to an inevitable conclusion like the last time you breathed out and failed to breathe in. Inside this house not quite a home,  warm bedside light shines out of the crack beneath each door, down an endless hall.  In the peaks of the trees, the crows ha and call (when the boughs rock, the cradle will fall). Here, you can count the minutes of dwindling light accumulating in the shadow that trails longer behind you; the day it breaks away, it leaves you  with a feeling without a name. We're in that limbic time where the heat hasn't kicked on yet,   and I wander through the drafty pre-dawn mornings like  the very last ghost in an empty machine.  the clock, which hasn't yet sprung back, creeps ever forward. My hands are steady when there's no one to watch me drink,  to tip the tablespoons of shining gold liquid into my cup until it runneth over.  the full moon outside? they call that a hunter's moon.  it hunts me through the windowpanes as I hunt the vestiges of you.  This house has many rooms and each time I leave one, the memory dissipates, slides into the cracks of my brain,  burns on the pavement below.  Here is where I sleep in different quilted beds  and dream choose-your-own-adventure dreams  only to wake in hallways, candle burnt down to my scarred fist. Everything is a parody of my everyday aesthetic,  as if to say, I know you and you're a joke .  Every time I bend to look under a door, to follow the thin knife of light, items I didn't know  I was carrying fall from my hands, scatter  like the feet of mechanical creatures.  I am not lost here but I am certainly not found.  I feel increasingly like a dream someone else can't stop having. The slight breeze from the last seventy-degree day ripples the surface of my heart. Soon will be the time of dying, the time of calls you never hoped to receive and hospital rooms,  crumpled leaves and bare trees. This is only the deep wardrobe leading up to it - lined with treasure, warmth and nostalgia  like the tunnel to Narnia except Narnia is just a replay  of that one brother's betrayal, over and over, a multi-stabbing from a sugared blade. 31. There are 31 rooms.  I think I'm fading, even as my reflection inside the mirror grows brighter.  It’s time to lift it off the wall and see what’s behind.

Box Elder. Top Story - October 2026.

Box Elder Bugs We played with them when we were little. Holding them in our cupped hands and giggling as their legs tickled our palms. Then we released them. They swarmed a broken old tree that we called the Boxelder Bug Tree. Now They Fly everywhere Their wings illuminated by the afternoon sun Brown spots against the rays When I want to go inside - There she sits (or is it a he?) on the sliding door. She sees me examining her. Her eyes watch mine Watches my movements, on guard I just want her to get off the glass door so I can go in alone . She crawls to a crevice. Okay, game on, little critter! I move the door, and she comes out of the crevice, then she leaves, sensing my irritation. I won't squish her. She knows that I think Why aren't the tree frogs and the birds eating them? I realize that I'd rather have her flying around inside , than the damned fly that has zoomed for days. I even opened the door for a bit one day hoping the dumbass would leave. Nope, the fly is still there and very cagey, very quick. Maybe dumbass isn't the right term for a fly that's managed to hang around when I want him gone. Don't leave the door open, I told the hubby I keep telling him I don't care if it is hard to open the door with your hands full; don't leave it open, not even a few inches. Stop it. The boxelders are crawling on the house, walking on the windows, looking for an entry point. When my daughter was a baby, she slept in my room near a tall window draped in white sheer curtains. She screamed one day, my baby, and when I went to her, the boxelder bugs were all over the curtains and in her crib, surrounding and frightening her. They must have looked so big to her. The vacuum worked. As a toddler, I took her to a river with friends, and horseflies swirled around her, and she ran screaming, totally petrified, and freaked out. The box elder bugs had traumatized my girl. Keep the door shut. Examine the entry before you try to enter; shut. no door cracked open. look in the cracks watch out.

The Bones Of Halloween. Top Story - October 2026. Content Warning.

This is a villanelle for the Spooky Season Challenge by S.A. Crawford which you can read about and join in here. It has been chosen as part of the Spillwords Halloween Collection and will be published here on 20th October 2026:

Blood Red Lilly

Respect the Living Women

the futility of forgetting

A curse?

What Is a Jellyfish?

Unconventional

Reality?

The Moon and I