Tag: Poetry About Halloween

Joe Mills: “Skeletons in the Waffle House”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine 
Skeletons in the Waffle House

 If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That's really bad...
                — Craig Fugate, Former Head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency 

When the trick or treating is over,
we end up here, as we usually do 
after a work shift, a dance, a date.  

It’s comforting to know exactly 
what we’re going to get, no matter 
who we are at the moment, a skeleton, 
ghost, jilted lover, single parent.  

The staff doesn’t care. They’ve seen it all 
year after year. The faces and bodies 
and costumes change; the coffee doesn’t. 

So, when we go towards the light, perhaps
we shouldn’t be surprised if we discover
it’s a Waffle House sign, the first place
to open after an emergency or disaster.

About the Author: A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills has published several collections of poetry, most recently “Bodies in Motion: Poems About Dance.”

Image Credit: Dvortygirl “Closeup of a homemade waffle” Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0

Leslie Dianne: “Pumpkins”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

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Pumpkins 

Let’s search for flawed
pumpkins this fall
go to the field
and find those
that rolled away
were pushed away
slid on the mud away
from their vines
let’s gather up the
shrunken ones
the shriveled up ones
the nobody will want them
ones and let’s want them
let’s give them some
reason for having broken
the soil, lost their flowers
sucked up the water
and fought to live
because if only for a minute
their orangeness
brightens the field
and our gloomy day
they’d teach us that
everything is useful
even the dying
fruit if it is
given a reason
to live

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About the Author: Leslie Dianne is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, playwright and performer whose work has been acclaimed internationally in places such as the Harrogate Fringe Festival in Great Britain, The International Arts Festival in Tuscany, Italy and at La Mama in New York City. Her stage plays have been produced in NYC at The American Theater of Actors, The Raw Space, The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater and The Lamb’s Theater.  She holds a BA in French Literature from CUNY and her poems have appeared in The Lake, Ghost City Review, The Literary Yard, About Place Journal and Kairos and are forthcoming in Hawai’i Review. Her poetry was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith “Pumpkin stand in Southington, Connecticut” (2011) The Library of Congress