Moon Tide Press sent out a call for submissions. The deadline is July 15th. Editor Eric Morago is looking for horror-themed poems. Rather than “scary” poems, he wants poems that tackle different themes and genres using horror movies, horror tropes, pop culture, and mythology. For details, click here.

So you have already written an elegy for Freddie Krueger’s hat, a pantoum for Jamie Lee Curtis’s scream, a tribute to Bart Simpson as Poe’s raven, a lyric to finger puppets and red paint, a contrapuntal of a conversation between Jack from The Shining and Elmer Fudd, an ode to the Woodsman’s ax in “Little Red Riding Hood” and a sonnet to the tree root that always trips the heroine fleeing the murderer, but you need another in order to send the full possible eight and are at a loss. Here is a popular idea: write a poem about Frankenstein’s monster and send it specifically to Eric Morago because he needs to read another one right now! 

Seriously, though, write that poem and make it so good he has to include it, or perhaps Eric will reserve it for an anthology devoted solely to Frankenstein’s monsters. So what is your monster? What have you pieced together from others’ guilt and from the extraneous bits of yourself that you never wanted to see in daylight but somehow recreated and attached to every mistake you ever made and let this compiliation of regret and rot out into the world? How did you feel as it broke all that you hoped would glimmer? Did you recognize the pattern of your thumb on its spleen, your forced smile on its stitched face, your rage in the flayed vocal chords? What is the shadow of a mirror image and what curse follows when you break it? How will you gather all of its pieces and where will you hide them from yourself?