Inhale

They’ve hidden your asthma inhaler in gingerbread houses.
You wheeze like a witch through the orange-brick grid of the morning.
The child-cooking ovens, the nun-burning glass-shards are smoking
And firing-squad dog-ends lie smouldering in oily black gutters.
Your eyes are the glints of the paving stones winking at nothing;
Your thoughts are the stink of the dustbins, a skull-cooked miasma.
Your asthma inhaler is hiding itself in the ashes
Of lungs that are sifting like soot through the rubbish-choked chimneys.
The withering, crepe-paper-crackling petals of living
Are drooping and crumpling and turning to bright flapping flame-tongues
Whose speech is a whisper of stories of comic-book monsters
Escaping from ovens to burn up the witches with glass-shards
And sift through the stink of the child-cooking gutters and chimneys
Till skull-dustbins give up the secrets that firing squads kill for
And gingerbread nuns crumple wheezing to crepe-paper ashes
To fill all the asthma inhalers with petals of smoke.

Eastre

Humpty Dumpty, eyeless in eggcup,
Hadn’t foreseen being boiled.
Inside the hen possibilities ramify elegantly.
But the eggcup is shell-smooth, shell-hard, shell-tight,
And shapes space only for the possibility
Of a boiled Humpty. Clasped in its curve,
The wall that allows no fall,
Here is an absolute here,
Knife is an absolute now.
King’s men scuttle and swarm,
Busy defining impossibilities,
Eating themselves in frustration.
None of us has foreseen
That when I slice Humpty open
She’ll taste of chocolate.

Simon MacCulloch lives in London. His poems live in Reach Poetry, The Dawntreader, Spectral Realms, Aphelion, Black Petals, Grim and Gilded, Ekstasis, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Ephemeral Elegies, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Emberr, View from Atlantis, Altered Reality, The Sirens Call, The Chamber Magazine, I Become the Beast, Lovecraftiana, Awen and elsewhere.

About the illustrator: Jaina Cipriano is an experiential designer, filmmaker, and photographer exploring the emotional toll of religious and romantic entrapment. Her worlds communicate with our neglected inner child and are informed by explosive colors, elevated play, and the existence of light in the dark.