Elvis Presley Haunts Graceland but not in the way that you might think. I see him in the kitchen binging on fried food, potato chips, and chocolate cake all washed down with full bodied beer while watching Hawaii five-O. He throws one of his dogs a Twinkie while his fans walk through the jungle room. Basset hounds are always hungry. That’s what makes them loyal. Ghost Elvis and his ghost dog walk around and squirt tourists with a water gun. Visitors can’t believe how hot the Memphis climate is and wipe their foreheads with the back of their shirts.
Melanie Browne is a poet and fiction writer living in Texas. Her work can be found at The Rye Whiskey Review, Pulp Metal Magazine, Midnight Lane Boutique and other online journals. Her work is also featured in Night Owl Narrative No.1 (a Cajun Mutt rag).
Their eyes slide over you when you walk in the dim bar and inch through the milling, processional crowd bidding to be next served at the long counter. The heavily made up women sit close at their corner table nursing drinks, their drinking funds palliative. Either one will have you but not until they finish the drinks they are on, then the obligatory ones you will buy them. They have that “Take me… But not just yet” look loitering in their eyes as heavy and half shut as yours: you wave at the bartender, circle one hand in the air and point down at table, nod at the women, pull up an unvarnished chair and sit down under press of buzzed and languid dead calm nonchalance. You exchange the usual opening overtures, worming ways into the core of everyone’s shared intentions, look from one to the other, take in the possibilities to wrestle with.
New Ghosts For Christmas
The ghost of Christmas Past appeared, shivering, covered in fur cloaks, frosted cheeks, frozen nose hairs and eye brows, and with breath that bellowed below zero.
The ghost of Christmas Present is here, comfortable in normal dress and a Spring jacket, in left over tan, a complexion the picture of health, bewildered that but for sooner dark, ’tis a normal day.
The ghost of Chistmas Future will arrive in surfer shorts and summer shades, walking in sandals, skin rife with melanoma, saying “The odds of snowfall fail cost/benefit analysis of placing a bet.”
Last Stand
Don’t stand on that clearance sale chair swept up in circular self isolation. Don’t stand on that clearance sale chair believing we will be legends later. Don’t stand on that clearance sale chair tightening a tie round your neck of braided twisted cordage: one leg of the faux wood chair creaks and strains under you… Unsure of itself, it might give out before you do.
David Alec Knight grew up in Chatham, Ontario, Canada.
He includes his middle name in his pen name as a means of disambiguation, his first and last name being fairly common. It is in response to being ignorantly perceived as a pretension by others that he wrote the poem “Disambiguation”.
In 2021, David was recipient of The Ted Plantos Memorial Award for Poetry. His first book of poetry, The Heart Is A Hollow Organ, soon followed. His second book of poetry, LEPER MOSH, was published by Cajun Mutt Press in 2022. It featured his artwork on the cover. Cajun Mutt Press would also feature a portfolio of his artwork online, as well as publishing his first full color comic story online, WRATH: The Masks We Wear.
Recent poems have appeared in Verse Afire, Cajun Mutt Press Featured Poet, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Medusa’s Kitchen. Anthology appearances include By The Wishing Tree, Poets For Ukraine Volume 1, Love Lies Bleeding, Phantom Parade, and The Cajun Mutt Press Halloween Anthology Zine 2022.
David sees dark and light around him in equal measure and that is reflected in his poetry, whether exploring working class themes, neurodivergence, addiction, urban living, our conflict with Nature, and/or the effects all these things have on individuals and relationships.
On their own people live and die. Some leave a scar behind. Some are mute as stones. Some are shrewd. Some are burnt to ashes. We all should look forward to death.
I will drink to it in the pouring rain. Day and night, I will drink to it. Many of us will all stiffen on some coroner’s slab, our raw flesh, dissected.
We should feel lucky to be ghosts. We will haunt and pester our enemies. We will never grow weary of our new lives. We will own the night.
I will clear my throat at odd hours. There will be no blood inside me. I will offer deadly poisons to my enemies. The ghost life will be glorious.
A Man Dines Alone
A man dines alone. His name is Pat. He is at the bakery with coffee and cake.
To hell he says with doctor advice. The diabetes is coming any day or night.
How many days will it be to go to the hospital and be declared not alive?
He is eating and drinking himself to death. He listens to no one. He will die alone.
Dead Bugs
Dead bugs on the window screen. Some are big and some are small.
I can see for miles and miles. The dead bugs no longer see.
I am convinced there are bigger windows and dead bugs. I am sure size makes no difference to death.
Born in Mexico, Luis lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Cajun Mutt Press, Escape Into Life, Mad Swirl, Oddball Magazine, and Unlikely Stories.
There’s that phrase “Give up the ghost” that’s been a part of our language for years on end. By “Give up the ghost,” it’s sometimes meant to stop fighting over little things. But more often it is used at the point of death. Seemingly to indicate the departure of a ghost or soul from the body. I think of this phrase often tonight when old ghosts haunt me around every bend. To what end, I do not know.
Will Mayo(†) authored Dreams Of Mongolia, Hoodoo Voodoo, The Shells Encasing Our Nothingness, Bone Talking, Perfection is Failure and other books of the extraordinary. He lived with his six-toed black cat in Frederick, Maryland. Said by some to be the most haunted city in the state. Most of his writing was done between the hours of 3 a.m. and sunrise.
*Editors Note In late July, brother Will passed away from a heart attack in his sleep. This was the last featured writer submission I had him scheduled for. He also sent 2 poems for the Cajun Mutt Press Halloween Anthology Zine no.1 before he left us. Rest easy, old friend. I’ll see you in the æther. You are missed by many.
