3 Poems
Elyssa Tappero
(she/her) is an agender ace lesbian and pagan witch who writes fiction and creative nonfiction micro prose and poetry. Her writing tends focuses on topics like mental illness, spirituality/paganism, queerness, the natural world, death and disasters, and how it feels to be alive for the end of the world (which is not great). Elyssa enjoys alliteration, run-on sentences, killing characters, and making vague references to obscure historical events. You can find her work at onlyfragments.com and on Twitter at @OnlyFragments. She also has zines with original art and writing at ko-fi.com/onlyfragments.
A Man Possessed
I am self-baptized in my own garnet blood
washed clean to be reborn as Dorian and Hyde
the wolf at the door, the grim upon the road
fanged and feral, hearkened to the scent of the hunt
a man possessed by strange desires and ill pleasures
Lupus Luna
jackal men, coyote boys
ribs like scars and moon-mad eyes
deserts in their hearts, hunger in their souls
sharp teeth, bright smiles, hot as coals
Death’s Road
Perhaps I have always walked death’s road.
After all, my corpse so easily reaches out
‘cross space and time to touch its siblings:
to lay in the snow on a stark Russian mountainside
(it was not your fault, Igor, you could not have known);
to curl up among the masses huddled
beneath Pompeii’s tephra burial shroud;
to drown in Sendai’s monstrous waves
or freeze in the north Atlantic on a clear April night.
These deaths, these beloved dead,
are clearer than my own memories.
Is this witchcraft?
Is this wyrd?
Is this anything?
