Her womb does not wander, but her heart
wobbles like a planet.  Since Cardiff’s moved
to London overnight, even sky’s slipped
bogward.  So, no one really blames her
when she sighs, “I won’t get up,”
and draws the musty bedclothes
over head.

Even Vesper can’t be bothered to object
now its feathers have turned purple from neglect
and spleen-burst temper.

Without Victorine, its tantrum might be moon flare
or poof for all Herself takes notice,
and Scritch is busy poking mortises
in hip to fix its rotting carcass,
so, Hob, alone, is left to mind the script
of blue-vein pattern that marks her wrists,
like marbled alabaster.

Too quick to cast indifference as disaster,
Hob’s lizard skin burns white in calcination
that might be worry, love, or even consternation,
but isn’t.
Indignation is its only mood,
self-interest its only obligation
though it doesn’t mean to kindle conflagration.

Soon, a cushion starts to sizzle,
then a tassel of her hair;
a titian braid goes up in Guy Fawkes fashion.

She’s a sparkle-bloom, a Leonid,
a candlestick cum whirligig,
and though Scritch knocks (by accident)
the washstand’s pitcher, empties it
upon the carpet, she will not crispen more than this
for flammability of skin
is offset by those drams of tinctured arsenic
mixed with antimony.

She’s more than bony in complexion.
She’s more or less immune to firing,
scald, suttee, and spontaneous combustion.

But, her temper isn’t proof against such unctionless behavior.
Scritch will not cease its ill-advised palaver
while Vesper rails against the window pane
like gravel, hailstorm, migraine.

Hob cannot be found, which is a loss for artful science
as odes on expiring gargoyles could be the rage in literary violence.

She never thought she’d say it, but “that child is missed.”
Herself can but admit that patience
with refractory gargoyles is a gift she lacks,
while Victorine was all but martyr-cast
when it came to wayward crossbreeds of anatomy and temperament.
She could keep them pent with mollified suspense
and even grim amazement.

Now, she’s gone, Herself is left to fend off polymorphous boredom,
disaster-prone estrangement
from that happy state of mindless mutability that preceded story.
She’ll have to think of something—else conclusion could get gory.
It’s bad enough when boudoir’s made a lizard’s crematory.

As Scritch, like mandragora’s root, keeps up its rib-cracked shrieking,
and Vesperbird makes hummingbees seem fast as dodos breeding,
Herself restores the bed that’s left and Hob’s red eyes flick, blinking
from in between the andiron dogs
like expectation piquing.

*

This week’s series of three poems comes from Brenda Mann Hammack’s neo-Victorian fantasy in verse, which revolves around a twelve-year old girl, Victorine, and her companion, a chimerical creature forged of cat, owl, and dragonfly.  At the beginning of the narrative, the duo resides in a manse that is part museum, part mausoleum. Fearing that adult caretakers will make a morbid exhibit of the Humbug, Victorine decides that the two must run away.  In her ensuing encounters with human children, the girl finds that the outside world is far stranger than she’d realized—and even her own nature is not quite as natural as she had believed.   In the following selections, the residents of the manse cope with Victorine’s absence.   The adult figures include: Herself, a spiritualist, who remains in perpetual mourning for her stillborn daughters, and Himself, a teratologist, or a creator of monstrosities.  Scritch, Vesper, and Hob are a trio of excitable gargoyles.

* * * * *

Brenda Mann Hammack is Associate Professor of English at Fayetteville State University where she teaches creative writing, women’s studies, and Victorian literature.  Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Toe Suck Review, Gargoyle, Mudlark, Caveat Lector,Otoliths, A capella Zoo, Bull Spec, Steampunk Magazine, and Arsenic Lobster.  She currently serves as faculty advisor and managing editor for Glint Literary Journal. Her contributions to Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure can be found here.

Not even fox cry could be more supernatural than goat-eyed Scritch wuthering in drawing room.
Even skeptics retch
as, ever mimetic, gargoyle delivers watersong through phossy-jaw.

“The spirits of the charnel-house are with us now,” Herself croons.

Himself nods benignant, eyes cat-lit.
Lucifer flies on lamp glass snooze.

Sitters clench fingers as Hob, beneath table, rubs skull to shinbones.

Flesh is eel jelly.

They had not meant to raise sleep-crusted Scritch, meant housebroken spooks
who spelled names in Ouija.

Himself seems indifferent to lung-rot, smiles indulgent.

Not Barnum, Robert-Houdin, or even Hermes (Trismegistus) could look so bemused by crisis,
shambles, slaughterhouse as gargoyles lick, pinch, snap, chew till devotees gust into gloom
safer than inside.[1]

Herself (abandoned priestess) is more ruinous blue than ever.  Her skin: bruised
under eggshell.  Arms, hands, even face craquelured.

By daylight, nothing improves.

Her spirits are oddly silent.  What good are reliquaries without worshippers?  Toe stub,
knucklebone.  Her little saints—those almost daughters kept in bottles—

had never known
disbelief, hunger, hope.  What could a gargoyle make of baby?
Curdled yolk.

Which one broke bottle glass, gulped formaldehyde like eggwhite?

Scritch:  transparent abdomen, dreg-clogged.

The following poems come from Brenda Mann Hammack’s neo-Victorian fantasy in verse, which revolves around a twelve-year old girl, Victorine, and her companion, a chimerical creature forged of cat, owl, and dragonfly.  At the beginning of the narrative, the duo resides in a manse that is part museum, part mausoleum. Fearing that adult caretakers will make a morbid exhibit of the Humbug, Victorine decides that the two must run away.  In her ensuing encounters with human children, the girl finds that the outside world is far stranger than she’d realized—and even her own nature is not quite as natural as she had believed.   In the following selections, the residents of the manse cope with Victorine’s absence.   The adult figures include: Herself, a spiritualist, who remains in perpetual mourning for her stillborn daughters, and Himself, a teratologist, or a creator of monstrosities.  Scritch, Vesper, and Hob are a trio of excitable gargoyles.

*

The shadow is a moving bruise,
the path like skin when arsenic stanches hue
and pulse.

Nerve betrays her as the crunch of cockle shell
perturbs the garden’s argumentative polyglot.

Requiescat won’t soothe them now the child has left.

They clamber on the turret: a copper-colored eft with wings;
a bent Methuselah without pelt or even flesh
to keep its insides to itself; a Celtic curse,
or, else, a feathered elf so fast one cannot tell its shape.

All three give meanness something else to gape
about besides itself.

Both near and far, Herself hears branch-slither:
“Whisker went that pretty maid who scold us stories?”
They listen for that soft, clipped cadence of a voice.

Waylaid, Herself cannot defray the cost of consciousness
now bent on hearing chronicles at bedtime.

She only knows a few, and those, like birdlime,
are loathed by flying things for sticking
so to rote, to rhyme that never varies from its pattern.

In sum, she can’t extemporize, and ever-afters
provoke barks of something turpentine
with anguish.

They can’t be sanguine in the face of zealousness,
and can’t abide a moral if it sounds like one.

Denied, they unwrench form from shadow,
and fill the air with pain, appassionato.

* * * * *

Brenda Mann Hammack is Associate Professor of English at Fayetteville State University where she teaches creative writing, women’s studies, and Victorian literature.  Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Toe Suck Review, Gargoyle, Mudlark, Caveat Lector,Otoliths, A capella Zoo, Bull Spec, Steampunk Magazine, and Arsenic Lobster.  She currently serves as faculty advisor and managing editor for Glint Literary Journal. Her contributions to Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure can be found here.