Mary Shelley’s Corridor
Thirteen, on Lincoln Street, I read by forbidden light - a plastic flashlight breathing weakly beneath the blankets, its beam a narrow tunnel through cotton and heat into someone else’s dark.
The Whistler on Harris Hill
Spoken by One Who Didn’t Listen People around Elmira tell the story different ways, but it always starts on the north side, where the Chemung drags slow through town and the hills decide who they’re going to notice.
The Ferryman Waits
Not all who wait at the threshold mean to enter. Some wait for you to step out. Fog thickens...congeals - the way dread settles when it chooses a host. Only then do I notice the lake breathing again, its exhalation brushing my skin like a hand returning from earth with something to confess.
The Lady of Woodlawn
By the crypt-mist’s breath and candle’s sigh — in the style of Poe Set in Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery, this poem listens for the echoes that linger between art and afterlife. The Lady becomes both muse and mirror - a figure through whom memory, creation, and mourning converge.
The Wolfman on Lincoln Street
I was eleven, and the house was so quiet it felt like it had stopped breathing. Downstairs, my family was watching some dumb show - Dad in his easy chair, Skipper curled on his lap, my mother probably knitting, my brother and sister laughing at canned jokes from the set.
The Wolfman (1941)
I love the old Universal horror movies ! Frankenstein , Phantom of the Opera, The Wolf Man, all of 'em! I remember being scared out of my gourd watching these movies on a Saturday night, and sometimes even in broad daylight on a Saturday morning!
When the Darkness Isn't Empty
The dark is crowded with attention, Every shadow seems to hear, And the silence bends around me Like a mouth pressed to my ear.
I Told the Crows
I didn’t sharpen a blade. I sharpened a sentence, let it worry my mouth for days,
The Terrible Trap Door (That Never Moved)
On Lincoln Street, when I was small, The attic watched us from the wall. Above her bed, it slept in gray -
The Firelight and the Unseen
On reading The Invisible Man The fire breathed low in the evening room, Its heart aglow through the tender gloom; The coals like thoughts that rise, consume, Then fade in molten dreaming. Outside, the wind began to moan, Yet here I sat - content, alone - With Wells’s words, soft-uttered tone, Through pages dimly gleaming.
The Church They Don’t Talk About
The church on Southside hill still stands. Nobody points at it. Nobody explains it. They just cross the street.
