
ALT Everywhere, Nowhere Ghosts do wait in wardrobes as an array of sheer-draped hangers, and it’s always their decision which one of them will be worn; wander out too from under beds: just thin sheets pulled over our fidgeting histories. In the blurry early morning park, the same yellow running-vest of a dead neighbour, seen: his difficult first steps becoming less local; memories mutter constantly like resentful but still unshakable teenagers. Once, attended a burial where mourners were outnumbered by overhanging crows: wailing hysterically instead of muted us, as if cries from another dimension or something more experienced in the near Middle East. Julian Cason

ALT Suspiria Sleep splinters at the sound of breathing. I bolt upright, ears tuned to deep, measured in-breaths held long, then expelled. Night is a lung, expanding with invisible force, contracting in strange elongated rhythm, relentless like a telltale heart beating under floorboards. The susurrating darkness summons me with sighs: swaddling sound that petrifies, hollows me like a bone deprived of marrow. I wake my husband with warnings of the fiend pressing acoustic mist against our windows. He laughs, saying it’s only Pobblebonk frogs, rolls over into sleep. I am left with my demons. - Gayle J. Greenlea

ALT poem His twig legs, whip-swing loose, on the horizontal top part of the street lamp, hands bookending his novella spine and you don’t want to look, but it's inevitable, the morbid fascination drawing your eyes towards the darkness atop the light. It appears that the vertical post holding that hawking moon has split down the middle, until your eyes adjust lie to truth. The second shaft is his unfurled, totem tongue. You shock shake, like a paper doll edging away from Edward Scissorhands, but at the same time,wondering what it was like to be Kim in that Tim Burton story.






















