Artwork: Awakening of the Moon Owl by Christopher Collingwood

Wolf Girl Relishes the Wolf Moonrise
LindaAnn LoSchiavo

In January, howling starts before
The Wolf Moon fattens, rouses appetites.

Lupa unzipped her human flesh, which masked
Her wolfishness, peeved that outsiders forced
Shape-shifters to conform when traditions
Created bonds, togetherness, and pride
In sharp teeth – carcass-shredding bold canines.

As dusk neared, she approached the meeting place.
The pack has punched through fog like ten knuckles,
Loud wolf song paving twilight with unrest,
Aware their wilding will start come moonrise.

Lupa recalled another hunt. A beast
Resisted as she clawed its breasts, no give
In that tough hide – but sweet pink meat throughout.

Her tipsy parents, partying with friends,
Believed she’s home in bed, not cleaning up
Intestines with her tongue, obsessed, moonstruck.

As words replaced gruff growls, she glanced around
To fold the scene like laundry, pack away
Red souvenirs, simplicities – unlike
Reprieves from hunger. Sly triumph will be
The windowsill she’ll rest her elbows on.

Note: January’s full moon is often called the Wolf Moon, a name which may date back to when wolves would howl outside villages.

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Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti, Cemetery Superstar
LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Retaining fame 160 years
After I died unknown – artwork unsold,
My verses unpublished – has been bizarre.

Do stars need darkness to appreciate
Their glowing? Or wise men to point them out?

My temperamental husband, mad with guilt,
Laid me to rest with poems, his bound book.
This he missed – more than my companionship.
Where’s my work now? Just then there came a crash.

Rude crowbars pried apart my long-sealed lid.
Men open-mouthed like choristers stared shocked.

Distraught, he’d sent them. Dig her up! He’ll learn
My flesh looked pale, my red hair’s grown more wild.

Rossetti’s poems sweetened maggots’ meals.
Worm-eaten scraps had crowned my coffined head,
A spectral tapestry akin to my
Ophelia pose, a dead girl prettified,
Myself a teen when painted by Millais.
A painting’s fame forgets dead models – but
Art helps us dream back everything that’s lost.
— — — —
Note: Elizabeth Siddal [1829-1862] wed Dante Gabriel Rossetti in1849. In 1869, her husband’s agent Charles Augustus Howell encouraged Rossetti to put an exhumation in motion to retrieve the poems from her grave.. . .

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Artwork: Nothing Like the First Bite by Will Jacques

Oupire
LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Despair found me a dozen steps from the hangman’s tree dazed by pre-dawn hush, squinting at the bark’s myriad imperfections and odd notches, some similar to letters. Wait. Did someone carve oupire? Impossible. Yet the word broke through the bastion of my thoughts, its sinister meaning slipping into my awareness like a skilled burglar. My attraction to broken wings, broken men, generated a low drone of dread, my lips parched with dry gloom and unuttered yearning. A moral failing.

A shadow bewitched the branches, thrilling me with a swoop of dark energy. Large footprints impressed the damp turf, great ghost ships of shoes. A tall, lean figure moved towards me, skullish in his gauntness and unworldly pallor, attire too formal for a forest trek. Rivulets of red streaked his stare, eyes all undimmed shock as if staring into questions that are invisible to mortals. Could he detect my goosebumps from my silhouette in poisoned starlight?

Suddenly, he covered my bare shoulders – with the plushest cashmere scarf or cape –saying that we must not keep friends waiting, urgency whispered with a heavy accent, betraying the lisp of a secret woe or ill-fitting dentures.

As my free hand clasped the fabric, my coil of rope slid to the ground. Untethered, I let the stranger usher me through the red moon’s mist onto a gravel path as if we’d both made a bargain under our shared sky.

. . .
Note: Oupire is the Polish word for vampire.

 

 

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