Midnight Snack

After the candles burn out

darkness comes to eat

the softness away

Image Description: a large Jack O’Lantern with slugs crawling in and out of its face.

This macabre short poem was inspired by a previous Halloween’s Jack O’Lantern that got invaded by hungry slugs. I’ve been working on some dystopian and horror short stories and flash fiction lately. The flash fiction is the hardest challenge for me. Trying to create a whole story in a thousand words or less has caused me to fill many pages of my composition notebook with beginnings that have no end because I couldn’t quite figure out how to set the world without going into so much detail. Poetry comes as easy to me as breathing. The whole poem doesn’t magically come out of my head completed, but I often have an image or a story in my mind’s eye, and I work backwards to say what I want to say without describing the message in terms that are too obvious and concrete.