Welcome to the Nightmare Magazine Story podcast.

Enter freely and of your own free will.

I am your humble host, Terence Taylor,

when very much at home with the children of the night.

Stay close as my muse, the medieval de Mugula guides us down into beautiful darkness.

In this episode, before our full-length story, we have a poem, zooming past shotgun houses,

written by Eva Rosalind and narrated by Susan Handfield.

But first, a word from our sponsors. And now, Susan Hadfield.

Zooming past shotgun houses by Ava Roslin.

I captured the sorrow you sent me like a star.

It burned my palm when it promised to nourish.

All I'm left with is this imprint, blackened flesh, starting to curdle and scar, raw.

We took the St. Charles streetcar once, wind blowing all around us, bell clanging, zooming past shotgun houses, a blur of pink and blue, saxophones and trumpets in the distance.

And then you went silent,

a ghost that faded into darkness without a word.

You left behind a miasma of blue smoke as gashes split open across my chest,

my back,

and I stumbled, drunk with mourning, off the streetcar,

and into a sea of orange diamonds, glistening in the clouds, rose and violet, stretched across the sky. I wrote this poem to capture the heartbreak of

friendship that involved unrequited love and the grief we hold for people who are still among the living,

but who treat us like we are dead, our ghosts. It also captured my

mourning for New Orleans during the onset of the pandemic, when everything was locked down,

...