The Escapees
In nightly hollows
the solemnity of lighted
Doorways to even wilder fields of
crushing zones
Raw red skin hangs out on the line
They dream soft in their egg-like cells
The lights humming overhead with promise
The cave they sleep in
Is in a gnarled tree covered in a million knots
A demoniac watches the larks and the bats
Instead of watching
The horror out there
is no less
Welcoming than here they say
There’s no living dead in the bramble
You may mistake a snake
For a vine
A fallen star for a haven
A dullard for a heartworm
They dream up gold boughs
Bogged down by guilt
Instilled by the keepers
The doppelgangers pose a threat in their sleeping formlessness
The snake coiled in the window of the office
Speaks in rasped notes
Speckled with moonbeams
Seeds have been planted in
One twin’s heads many revolutions ago
By the inmate with an arm missing
The sallow unrepentant swine
The long halls are strewn with petals
While the slovenly sentry sleeps like still water
And remembers a calling he once had
To be a specter in the nascent winter
Recalling a haunt in a crepuscular town
With shut-ins and nocturne mothers
The twins unraveled in the garden
With pale hair
Lidded eyes
They remain glowing asleep in the prison
There’s a feast with incisions
Rattling sore dancers
Past the smoky presence of trees
A sleep spell should waver so long in the dimness, till expelled
While we search far for a door to summer-tide
There’s plumes of shine deep in that sky
There will be a ceremony swept away
By the manic
Escape comes so slow with nothing but startling
Dreams in a cell
Lawmen are scornful of the fires
Emerging in moonspots veiled
with flies
There’s a sliver in the water
Wonderingly say the twins
Dangling over the edge at the
Droplets of small lights
We’re in the night’s hands
Evading the reaper on the wind
By the coming of dawn
The sentry will uncover our skins
With nothing in them
While we wander toward edges
Vaporous animals
Mirror images
The keeper, gluttonous man
Will have us hung by our necks
Chainsaw
Old bug eye, we used to call him
Out in his shed cradling his dead
Milk pouring from his wounds
— Nick Gordinier is a 23 year old writer/poet from Richmond, VA. He’s influenced by Frank Stanford, Jim Morrison, Clive Barker, and Jean Rollin among others.