BY CATHLEEN ALLYN CONWAY
Author's note: These are all found works, some using modified versions of traditional poetic forms. Their sources are Toby Whithouse's Doctor Who episode VAMPIRES OF VENICE, Stephen King's SALEM'S LOT, the stage adaptation of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, miscellaneous Sylvia Plath poems, and DRACULA by Bram Stoker. They are part of a longer work, Bloofer, a collection of found poems on the female vampire that forms the creative component of my PhD thesis.
THE VAMPIRE WHO SAID HE WAS YOU
He bites. A mouth just bloodied.
The blood flood is the flood of love.
A love gift utterly unasked for.
Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.
The box is only temporary, the
black bunched in there like a bat.
I bleed or sleep all the blackening morning,
separated from my house by headstones and corpses.
I am red meat, red hair; marble facades.
The corpse at the gate petrifies as I rise.
THE VILLAGERS NEVER LIKED YOU
I wake to a mausoleum.
This is the room I could never breathe in.
Black bat airs wrap me, raggy shawls,
blue garments unloosing small owls.
Eternity bores me; my soul dies for it.
I eat men like air. I never wanted it.
LUCY’S SWEET PURITY
I could see in the white flesh a dint
then Arthur struck with all his might:
contorting and cut, The Thing writhed,
a blood-curdling screech from red lips.
Arthur never faltered, deeper driving
His stake into the body, twisting and wild,
crimson foam smearing white,
blood from the pierce welling, welling.
The teeth ceased to champ,
the writhing became less.
On his forehead sprang
drops of sweat, broken gasps
came his breath, and a light
broke his face, glad and strange.
Cathleen Allyn Conway is a PhD creative writing research student at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the co-editor of Plath Profiles, the only academic journal dedicated to the work of Sylvia Plath, and the founder and co-editor of women’s protest poetry magazine Thank You For Swallowing. She has previously worked as a journalist on UK trades and national newspapers, and as an English teacher in inner London. Her poetry has appeared in print, online and in anthologies. Her pamphlet Static Cling was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2012. Originally from Chicago, she lives in south London with her partner and son. You may follow her intermittent feminist ranting and retweets at @mllekitty.