Artwork by Amy Alexander.
There Is Worse In Life Than What We Dream
Inside the belly of a crow, you are
ferried somewhere you do not know. Huddled
against your sister there, already far
away in first nightmare. Twitches, cuddled,
her tremors, count, you, wide awake, will ache
a similar amount to metronome
of horses’ hooves that escalate to take
you through a weeping woods. Farther you roam
than ever before, seizing while sister
would snore now less afraid asleep than you.
Above her nodding head, a sinister
slice, intermittent, carriage window view
of wrought iron gates, skulls that seem to scream
— for there is worse in life than what we dream.
About Crow Carriage:
Crow Carriage is a horror poetry collection set in the countryside, a Victorian England village populated by some terrible people. One of them
is a nobleman, amateur scientist conducting a terrible experiment inducing nightmares and extracting cortisol from young women. This requires their abduction, and this poem is the story of the abduction of two sisters inside his ominous Crow Carriage.