(Eleanor Nellie Vance–Eleanor Crain)
Eleanor gave birth in the dark, ectoplasm
spattering the walls. Her lust for Hill House’s
brick, symmetry and song, her maenad’s
striptease for a patient Arthur Crain
porcelain body bleached with white,
starved for bloodless phantasms,
a ghost’s flight, stuttering, dizzy,
caught.
Eleanor flagged down any spirit that would
have her, stuffing a monkey’s paw down
her shirt before attending a demon’s
purity ball, hoping her dark raisin eyes
would be grateful and still
Scaly heaves
of an inverse psalmist’s
crawling limbo
As a quick injection or cure
her face in suspense rae
maybe to the tinfoil
birds of Teske’s spirit photographs
picked by tinfoil birds in the Elysian fields.
She would grow strong
on the harvested spirit,
the order of stilled breath
in forgetful fields
Crane would whisper a curse in her ear
something different with gears spinning
as her music box, the pearl and pink
embroidered panels, her song
Come home, Eleanor
to where the nocturnal
fortunes
are drawn
Fed to the shade,
she parts in oblivion’s
soupy fugue
a nightingale’s song
of dim recall, the house’s
unseen suitors in thrall
to a mysterious hunger.
John Thomas Allen is a 41 year old poet from Albany, NY. Recent work has appeared in The Adirondack Review, Surrealist Star Clustered Illuminations, and has two chapbooks to his name. He has been published in Veil: A Journal of Darker Musings, Arsenic Lobster Magazine, and SuRvision.
Published 10/31/24