Category: Haunted Passages

Haunted Passages Poem: “In the Dark” by David Cazden

Doctors gaze at Mom’s CAT scanthe way astronomers lookbetween galaxies.For space is mostly darklike our old staircasewhere I’d turnby the dim-lit landing,angling to the last steppast my brother’s closed door.Once he didn’t make the turn,winding up on the roof―legs over guttersamong boughsswaying like drunken angels.The last day I see Momin the memory wardshe has forgotten…
Haunted Passages: Six Poems from The Witch’s Flight by John Schertzer

The Witch’s Flight 1 I see you rounding the cornerwith your flag. You made it yourselffrom a table cloth, put some knobs on it, bright colorscalled yourself a beginningof something still undefined still nowhere to be foundand I am there beside youwaiting for it to happen. The Witch’s Flight 2 I saw you rounding the…
Hybrid Essay for Haunted Passages: “Over at the Frankenstein Place” by Joanna Acevedo

Over the past two weeks, please list the items you have lost. As a teenager I knew how to scam my way into the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They still did it at the Chelsea Cinemas, which is closed now, and graffiti adorns its sad plywood window coverings. But this was…
Haunted Passages: Two Poems by LM Brimmer

Un-Imagined Mother n. • I dreamt a baby again • the morning after my empty womb evolved through the limitless contraction • Mother ? I can’t. Mother I can’t. • just your painful, irreverant abdomen, halfling eye half cortex • accustomed to the gut of a wolf • grieflonging has grayed me • Mother of…
Natalie Marino: Two Poems for Haunted Passages

If I Were a King I could believe in God. I would wish the grapefruitheld in my handcould turn into a little sun. I would refuse to seethat everything born before me was already gold,that even wealth can’t stop a daughter from cryingat the sight of a hardened rose. If I were a king,I wouldn’t…
Haunted Passages Nonfiction: “Leap” by Karen Crawford

It was a number you didn’t want to celebrate, but of course, I surprised you. A room at the “castle on the hill” with its California bungalows, French-style turrets, and an old school New York Park Avenue vibe. It was the infamous penthouse suite 54. It was famous people undercover. It was too much champagne.…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Joe Koch’s Story Collection Invaginies

Over the past few years, as I’ve delved further into indie and experimental literature and been exposed to the dazzling array of queer writers thriving therein, I’ve discovered something of a bad habit in myself—a tendency to automatically read as-yet-unidentified narrators as the same gender as their authors. I’ve been caught with my comprehensive pants…
Haunted Passages Flash Fiction: “Goatee” by Sarp Sozdinler

Your uncle is breastfeeding one of his goats in the yard, and you’re standing by his side, wondering what the right collective noun for baby goats would be. You remember goatee was the word your father used for that big hairy abomination on his face, his lips framed like a shelf placed on top of…
Original Haunted Passages Short Story: “The Little List of Garden Monsters” by Jordan Dilley

In the garden, the monsters bloom. Stems and vines trendil over and under, through and back, vibrating to the rhythm of a dance that has no rules. There are no plaques here, no little hand-painted signs segregating herbs from flowers from vegetables. Anonymous to others, but we know their names. Martha has a little list.…