Poetry by Rodney Wilder

            Jordan Meeter CC



​
To You, O Haunted Spaces

Here, my fingers splay into the dark,
eyestalks prodding these haunts to
graze what dread has become them.
And what I have learned, my
                exquisite horrors, is that
it is no small thing to scar, to grow an
abhorrent oak over soil salted with
someone else’s evil.
                             What
jellying macabres others have hidden
within us, seeds that don’t look like
seeds but sprout our strong at
wrong angles & sop pregnant our
thirsty & once-perfect floorboards.
The mouths in which home wasn’t
bloody enough already. A flock of
obsidian birds thought better if
slicked with carrion. Whatever un-
wingable crust the sun might
find there like names rather
choked with than given to stone.
                       My storied torments,
                                           my witchsoot
strewn on the roofs of your burners,
                                                I’ve seen how
warnings against forming ourselves a-
round the things done to us come
gutted & bleak from your baleful & I
am not here for those caricatures. I
do not need another nightmare that
finds something damaged &
decides it belongs on a stake, an evil
better if ridded entirely. Not
when your ghosted halls & your
tree limbs twisting abysmal moan the
one tealight I still find lit in my teeth:
                                                            Survive.
If I have ever been considered a strong
thing, I trust that the claw-marks
scarring gnarls into my growth & the
       fresh cruelties
                   laid to empty under my roots
have something to do with it.
                   To hold living’s hideous
poetry in your belly & still choose to
possess this world something wanted,
to that I reach my arms around all
your blood-bowed & ghastly & ever-
demonized &                I am nine, now,
in the lap of my mother. The safe
& still for boy beat breathless, for boy
fathered a haunted house of wounds a-
howl & undead underneath each
skyward refusal to rot.                My mother
was the first maple tree I knew to be
husbandried with this
               blight of the living dead & still
contort her whole broken toward Heaven.
                      & still sieve its salvation down
across the traumas left wedged in her like
ax-heads swung & called love.
& still bloom the most unyielding autumn,
an ever-red, bled
                 to ensure her children some shade.
        What the sun
does to her leaves is abattoir,
is charnel lighthouse, is wrack. But
         to sit there—her worst lives a
nightmare spited by persistence, & myself
a coffinwood willow                              growing
around my own casket—to sit below
that bowl of prismatic blood / your
bowls of prismatic blood & learn
what options I hold in this haunting,
how holy it can be to be the
unholy thing done to you & live anyway,
                                 each
a mansion’s moldering grandeur,
                                 each
a too-quiet forest di-
                         gesting the gore in its lichen,
a folktale of broken bodies,
a grove of stab wounds, of livid shadows
coming to whatever
terms there are to come to when death
uglies their hunger & reach,
                                   each
the grisliest glory roaring for more of
what belonged to us before    & still does.

When I at last
pull my hands back from the dark, there
are dots of blood rubying each fingertip.
As they swell, become my own
ghoulish Eucharist, I swear something
in the haunted black holds me in arms I
have been known by before,
                                                   & my verdure
begins to burn sanguine. & my shade
becomes a bowl of prismatic blood,
a hope for damaged saplings,
a coffinwood willow lit
                                 the luridest of beacons.
Come & be held. Come & be held.
Come with your bellies of death
                                                             & be held.
​

Rodney Wilder (he/him) is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with work appearing in places like Half Mystic, Anti-Heroin Chic, and FreezeRay Poetry, as well as Stiltzkin’s Quill, his most recent attempt at grimoiring all the geeky incense left lit in his ribcage. When not forest-bathing beneath the nearest cluster of Oregonian old-growth, he likes haikuing horror movies and getting annihilated by his wife at Tetris. Find him on Instagram at @thebardofhousewilder.

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