I Am An Open Grave by Emily Smith-Miller

If I wasn’t already losing everything, I’d say take me as I am, but with so little sense of self left at hand, I understand your reticence, I understand the organ music, the black lace curtains, and a final resting space of cold, disturbed earth. I feel the grass for the last time, I smell the leaves in your hair, my eyes are going blind, but the images are retina burned and will shine while I lie in the dark. You never knew I had a heart light like the one that sings now, a beacon for the missing and misanthropic, the longing lonely lovers whispering those names over split bleeding tongues. You know you can only say a name so many times before it starts to cut your mouth muscles, it causes pustulating sores, they burst and drip vile poison down your throat. Don’t say my name too often, I like your lips. You always brought her lilies, I think she  knew, because those lilies grew, and they gave the graveyard that special smell of afterlife. What will you bring me, when the box is lowered? Will you put the thistles and nettles in my plot? The place where wild-eyed youthful love goes to choke out its death rattle. I wish I could tell you the ground will be kinder to me than the world, but I’m assured no mercy and they’re calling to me, singing out my name, church choir, scalding undead fame. Hold me, I’m decaying, no I’m shedding this mortal coil, this skin, these bones, that hair, these eyes, these gray-green headstone eyes. I’m aging in accelerated freeze frames, one nail-biting second at a time. And they are here to bury my final sentence alive, watch me go, watch me fade. Cobalt was her gaze and she was delicious, I’d never take it back, not one life altering minute of it.

© 2012 Emily Smith-Miller

Emily Smith-Miller is a writer from Austin, TX. She is the editor and founder of the horror website The Carnage Conservatory, www.carnageconservatory.wordpress.com. She has two hellion pets, a cat named Sadie and a puppy named Finnegan Ulysses Jameson. She attended NYU for English and journalism and can be found at random corners of the internet.  She writes strange poems and bloody horror stories that you can read at www.emilysm737.wordpress.com. She loves werewolves, Vincent Price, and ABBA. She is ready for the zombie apocalypse

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