Addison Fulton
Here is an excerpt from the anthology
I bought a haunted painting today
It looms over my mantle piece
All beautiful and macabre
All day I’ve stared at it
And I try not to blink as the ghost fills my eyes
It doesn’t move
It doesn’t shriek or shift or bump in the night
But it haunts me
I know it’s haunted
Because they all are
The artist stays in the art even when they are gone
All artists are dead and all painting are haunted
A piece of the spirit embedded in the ink
The marble
The pen
The oil paint or the berry juice or the blood
Museum floors creak with the weight of the ghosts
Who hold my hands as I stare like a deer in the headlights
At them
At the soul, laid bare
The ghost, standing shyly beside the body of work
Asking “What do you think? Was it worth it?”
And it was
My god it was
In my garage there’s a box of drawing from my childhood self
This too is haunted
Too haunted
Her little, cold ghostly hands in mine
Telling me it’s a drawing of me
Her future self
And it is a scribble with a smile in field of flowers
I hope the drawing is accurate
Then she shows me a drawing of a kitten and a fire breathing dragon who are best friends
She haunts me
Church ceilings and portraits and still lives
Of pomegranates at their ripest
And all of the cave paintings
Each and every one
Our first ghosts
Marks of the first humans
Painting horses and
Pressing their hands against the walls
Of the caves
Reaching forward and back and in and out
Haunted, haunted, haunted!
It’s all haunted!
How beautiful!
Rapid Heart Rates is an anthology designed to explore the relationships between what is traditionally considered beautiful and what is traditionally considered horrifying. Fear, love, sex, death, desperation, humanness, and monstrodum are all one in poetry. A link to buy it is below!
Copyright Addison Fulton. All rights reserved.