Midnight Veil
By: Erin Moine
It walks beside you in the dark—
—dark as the star-studded quilt covering the sky
at midnight.
Midnight, the time in the ouroboros when the Veil sheds
a layer,
like a Copperhead sheds a layer of skin.
The skin of the Veil, this pulsing creature
this cryptid of malice, evanescence, and poise.
You don’t see it immediately.
Seeing it won’t birth belief—
yet, feeling it, following you as you sleep,
as you eat—was that a moldy blueberry?—
as you walk in the dark of midnight stars.
Steps faltering,
nostrils burning, vision swimming
like a Venus Girdle comb jellyfish,
invisible, most of the time.
Science will call it anxiety, hallucinations, or grief.
Intuition will speak louder than silent screams,
a silence that screams to the part of you hiding
behind disbelief.
The midnight stars decorate the Veil—unseen, yet felt—
it doesn’t wait for belief
to creep.
A silent beating heart,
pushing blood through your ears.
The Veil exists with midnight, as you exist
upon this Earthen soil.
Patient Apocalypse
By: Erin Moine
She stands atop wet concrete, her porcelain skin
cracked, like parchment.
She watches with eyes of deep ink,
eyes undulating, like a worm in blood.
Her dress is a dreadful ivory ocean of tears,
swaying like a dancing mantis.
Her hair reminds me of thin, shadowy wires,
hanging like a river
from her oily scalp.
She blinks once.
I don’t dare blink in return.
I cannot look away.
I hold my breath.
She does not breathe.
My breath catches in my throat.
She blinks again, and smiles red.
Her teeth are razors, decorated inhuman.
She waits at the bottom
of the driveway.
Her patience is an apocalypse.
Gossamer Cryptid
By: Erin Moine
I wake at midnight, aware of she.
Glimmering gossamer wings of a dragonfly, a slumped figure waits
in silence. Legends paint a canvas of her beauty, but not for me.
Eyes, like blinking red stop lights at the
fork in the road. My legs are numb, a tingling in my foot.
The gossamer princess crouches, taking a lock of my
hair between her corporeal fingers.
I inhale, and fall back into bed.
Mercurial Garden at Dusk
By: Erin Moine
Willowy wisps of sapphire blue.
A cool breeze lifts a drooping fern,
then slams it back to the dewy grass,
droplets stinging your eyes.
Vivid shimmers of cerulean, scarlet, gold, and lilac.
A bone-thin banshee squeals her sorrow
through a ragged, raw throat
among the dead Doll’s Eye plants.
Sharp golden rose buds among a puddle of ink,
sticky against your fingertips.
A reaper swathed in tatters saunters
through joyous stinging nettle.
The will-o’-the-wisp sighs out her lungs.
The banshee cries stinging, acid tears.
And the reaper slips in the gluey ink, falling
toward the rotten soil.
This Field of Nowhere
By: Erin Moine
WE found it lying in the grass at dusk.
Peculiar wouldn’t cut it—
this object of glossy, pale blue.
My sister called it a Portuguese Man o’ War,
a Physalia physalis, like the old-fashioned Jell-O cake our grandmother made.
Why would such a creature be here,
in this field of nowhere and nothing?
My sister reaches to touch it,
and I slap her hand away.
She berates me for it,
but I don’t want her to get stung.
I poke it gently
with a rotting stick coated in cow manure.
This squishy, blue, and soft creature
exhales a whiny sigh. My sister removes her jacket,
wrapping it tenderly around the creature.
“We should take it to the Fish and Wildlife office in town.”
I tell her they won’t believe us.
My sister’s jacket begins to glow blue.
A memory, a snap, and then—
I am sitting in the grass at dawn.
The creature that is not a Portuguese Man o’ War
lies in a test tube
in upstate New York.
The world awarded it a thousand articles —
this Fae, this being from elsewhere.
It is present day.
I am alone in this field of nothing,
and my sister is dead.