Issue 1 (Theme: Vampires)
In which we divulge our deepest literary indulgence patterns.
It’s our first issue!
Thank you to all of the artists who have contributed to this issue. We are nothing without you.
A note on placing bios before works: This is an editorial choice. What comes first in your mind, the artist or the art? Care to comment your reasoning?
- Stella
Hannah’s Editor’s Note:
Thanks everyone who submitted, considered our magazine, @’d us in those Twitter tagging things (I am bad at the internet…), or otherwise glanced at our magazine and went, “hey, that looks sick!” and told us so. It means a lot! I would also like to thank Stella, for being the best co-editor ever, my mom, and my local public library, where a lot of this magazine was edited, written and workshopped.
I hope you all enjoy the incredible work below! This post contains all pieces in Issue 1, but if you are more of a read-a-piece-a-day-with-my-AM-coffee type of person, we’ve got you. Starting September 1st, we will also be sharing individual pieces daily. If you enjoy them, please let the author know, and give them a follow on Twitter, or whatever it is people do these days to show appreciation and support.
Thank you everyone for the support. We hope to see you soon for Issue 2.
Best,
Hannah from bloodbathhate <3
Thursday, Sept 22, 2022: As a result of Max J Carter’s actions, we have chosen to remove their writing for the foreseeable future. We do not condone their actions.
Poetry by Calia Jane Mayfield
Calia Jane Mayfield (she/her) is a Black poet from Georgia is always looking for new music. You can find more of her writing in Wrongdoing Mag, Not Deer Mag and Ample Remains. You can find her on twitter @yetiwaterbottle.
philosophy on violence
knife to sharpen teeth into fangs and nails into talons. gold shoved into ears clipping the skin. becoming the monster of nightmares and nights lit wholly in green that leave a sick feeling in your gut that’s never been fear but only recognition. and you’ve started seeing yourself in opposition to divine judgement. the lone soldier in a war for your body forged to be a weapon. and you will become fire to cleanse the feeling of being watched even if it means become something worse. and you will do what needs to be done if it means you are no longer only complicit. is it better to destroy or be destroyed, you were never one for philosophy on violence. and you will let the bruises heal even if you push into them with your thumbs for days first. and you will rename yourself vengeance in the name of retribution. and so what if your skin splits if your soul stays intact this time. nothing has ever been free and it’s easier to pay in blood if you’re doing it willingly. and you can never unknow how relentless this process of cutting out your heart is replacing it with another set of eyes an unearned consequence of your own design. and no one ever said this wouldn’t hurt and they never said it would be worth it but you never asked. but now you have the answers in hunting the things you’ve seen in the dark and there’s no more questions you’d want to ask.thoughts on batman and power in the comment section
i watch them argue that guns would solve the problems faster and is it really better to leave them with broken noses and bruises that will heal and arms out of socket and is death that bad compared to fear? 1/
i keep my mouth shut now. and the power that comes with the knowledge of how much easier it would be to open my mouth teeth sharp and hungry and waiting to inflict permanent damage. and maybe i’m not 2/
seeing the point. the tip of the gun or the tip of my teeth pressing themselves into words out of shrapnel. and sure, he uses rubber bullets and sure they’re dangerous and sure sometimes i say those things out loud. 3/
and maybe the fear of what could have happened is enough for us. the fear that they’re the reason we became this; fear is turning into that which we said we’d destroy. fear that once won’t be enough. and maybe we’re 4/
weak and scared and stupid. maybe everyone else is right we don’t know that it’ll spark something insatiable and savage and addicting in our bones. maybe it’s just the fear and if we laugh enough we can stop it. 5/
is death that bad compared to the fear of what could be? power comes with limits and maybe we’ve been too limiting in what we could achieve. stepping over bodies that can’t feel the fear anymore might be 6/
worth our sanity. stepping over our own tears might be worth the greater good. what are our promises if justice cannot kill for us?in which death should not grant you penance
i am making my arguments at the gates with the boy with wings and flaming sword. he’s trying to keep me from leaving him. i can see your body every time i close my eyes. your chest unmoving, your mouth finally stilled. i’ve been begging the boy to come down the stairs with me all large eyes and pleading and compulsion prayer. i’m begging my body to move without him. i’m begging my screen filled head to stop reimagining that night with more pain. i’m begging my hands to stop remembering holy and righteous power coursing through their blood. virtuous eyes watching tainted venom tears leak onto your face willing me to have faith you can course correct the failing body in front of me. willing ignorance was swept from the heart you branded with broken glass confessions in my church pew ears. the boy is preaching to the sleeping choir tears trailing my cheeks. forgiveness sermons seeping into the drug laced liver soul i was provided as armor. i’m begging for divine judgement to grant me communion of your heart in my mouth to be chewed and spit up like stale bread for eternity. passion and religion clawed its way to the knife in your back that night and its job isn’t finished until i paint the lines of my eulogy with your blood. the holy boy drags my hands back inside the gates promising the hounds your bones. we stop begging and sing the hymnals of your judgment for the cherubs sleeping innocence and wine drunk. Poetry by LE Francis
LE Francis is a recovering arts journalist writing poetry & fiction of varying length from the rainshadow of the Washington Cascades. Find her online at nocturnical.com.
The last supper at a strip club
Do you even know how my body
should look? Pink as the inside
of an conch shell & legs like the lobes
of my lungs. Let me be, let me be
seen, let me be seen wholly, holy. Let me
become myself in the act of being seen.
The universe sways its hips & a star is born,
God sure is a horny motherfucker
but I digress, I lean unto thou & thou sayest
time is a bloated tick on the back of His hand
& it is the digestion of time which makes flesh.
Time becomes shit becomes inches of skin
corrupted by a summer afternoon when I was
nine, I ate three otter pops & fell asleep
on the lawn. Pink & blue & green – the imprint
of grass on my back hatched with lines
rendered from the movement of the cosmos; my body
inside this masterpiece, the elongated
berth of my sins caught in the distortion of the living.
My Lord, are the things that matter made lighter
in the presence of sin? Shorter goodbyes,
shattered fingers, an uneasy sense that I am not
actually living this life. Oh God, I am a blur,
I am a whisper, I am a flutter of the tablecloth
within & without, in your eyes & my own, & I dance
this table, haunt this painting. Legs like the outreaching
tendrils of a dying star. We see each other
across the table & for a brief moment, we exist.Manifest
An explosion of wingbeats climb the sky
punctuate a conjuration, create music as long & forked as my tongue, daisy tendrils
of ink & stem catch wind, rattle this shadow split
open, divide imaginary hemispheres of heart, a breach
of gore & tears, as green & soft as the ferns that graze
my ankles whispering prayers to exorcize all wanting
from me; I am petals-
blooded & in bloom; if you love me not, stop
exacting yellow blades from my veins as proof. Speak
this spell from both sides of my whore mouth — love me,
love me not, quit your rock-eyed quiet,
we both know
there is nothing beneath the ridge of your ribs, rip
my heart from the hollow of my throat; your tired eyes lost
under the shadow of your granite crown; pinnacles cut through
the fog of my body,
entrails like garnets pour over the mountainside, love me,
love me not, meadows languish under the broken clouds, love
me, love me not, summer-spent, smokestack sky, glare my green
heart gray again. Breathe deep & remind me & the meadow
who it is that you cannot love.Poetry by Bri Gonzalez
Bri Gonzalez is a Chicana/e, queer poet and an MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder. Their work is forthcoming or can be found in Not Deer Magazine, Crow & Cross Keys, Janus Literary, Coffin Bell Journal, and more. She spends most of her time playing D&D, bingeing horror movies, and bothering her void cat, Dahlia (above). Check Bri out at bgwriting.org or @bg_writing on Twitter.
Let’s Take a Midnight Trip to CVS
Teeth full of pills pilled teeth teethed milligrams
chalk residue molar measuring tongued focus
balance canine cratering lungs dryswallow
when most don’t many too teeththroated
teethbitter bliss sidewalkedoodled tastebuds
blooddrawn maps my veins where I
pinpoint places to beg and you
teeth off each one. "You better hold on tight, spider monkey."
green stab | skin bouldered | cradle
tinted death | armed
forest cracks
needing | domained |
fluorescent illuminates
hell | hole glance glitter-
spat | pale- coastcloud
break | a zoom curious |
saying out | loud
siphoning spideredHaiku and Tanka Poetry by Jerome Berglund
Jerome Berglund graduated from the University of Southern California’s Cinema-Television Production program and spent a picaresque decade in the entertainment industry before returning to the midwest where he was born and raised. He has exhibited many haiku, senryu and haiga online and in print, most recently in the Asahi Shimbun, Failed Haiku, Scarlet Dragonfly, Cold Moon Journal, Bear Creek Haiku, and Daily Haiga. Jerome is furthermore an established, award-winning fine art photographer, whose black and white pictures have been shown in New York, Minneapolis, and Santa Monica galleries.
1 acquired tastes — tray is offered dismissed with suspicion 2 small tart cherries pit will catch you by surprise bone in ribeye 3 wedlock/whoredom Janus-minted capital’s Thalia and Melpomene 4 hitchhiking spiral galaxy return to sender 5 potted flower wan in the sultry dark can still make you out by my flickering candle but must strain my eyes
Poetry by Zeynep Dide Cavus
Zeynep Dide Cavus (she/her) is a spirited young writer based in Istanbul, Turkey. Apart from being a writer, she is also an avid reader, museum visitor, and crystal collector. She explores myths, moments, and the unspoken in her work.
carmilla
[…]
ghastly faces,
i saw yours in a dream.Poetry by Abigail E. Sims
Abigail is an emerging writer. She currently daylights as a content-wrangler for a technology company in the great city of Austin, Texas, and spends her free time playing with snails or swords, depending on the day. Her work has previously appeared at Beyond Words, Sand Hills, and Gris-Gris. You can find links to all of the above (and more) on her website, abigailesims.com. Abigail can be found on Twitter at @potentialyeti.
A love letter from Charybdis
They do not make room for women like us in this world—
Loud, ravening, swallowing-up word water
I strip bones sinking to the seafloor, crack hips
in the crashing surf.
Oh, lady, their fear-scent,
sweeter than kisses on the mouth—
We do not need teeth to feast on their fatness!
All the sea sinks into me;
rich, warm, teeming
never—just there, almost, yes—quite enough.
Voracious, vast and wide. Let us rumble,
let us howl, let us devour all their young men down like cattle
cloven-hoofed.
Lean-jawed, teeth-and-snarl, beloved appetite:
snap your six jowls heavy with sailor-meat, heave
that sunny, sinuous flail marking death.
Open his mouth with your baying—
I will fill it with seawater!
No, they do not have any room for you and I, sister,
so we will take, and take, take;
until we swallow up the world
and there is nothing left
but hunger
and
us. Art by Chloe Coblentz
My name is Chloe Coblentz. I am a US-based artist specializing in haunting and melancholic illustrations. Since childhood, I have had a passion for the visual arts, and at 18 I began studying with the Watts Atelier of the Arts to pursue my artistic career. At the same time, I learned to paint independently by studying artists I admire. I create my illustrations traditionally using watercolors, colored pencils, and gouache. My influences are horror literature, dark romanticism, and gothic aesthetics.
Socials:
https://www.instagram.com/haunted_chloe/
https://www.deviantart.com/hauntedchloe
Fiction by Braeden Collins
Braeden Collins is a writer based in the frozen prairie in Manitoba, Canada. Rather than succumb to the usual torpor of small-town life, he chose to pursue writing as an inventive way of losing money and sanity. His work has been published by JAKE Mag, and is also pinned under a magnet on the fridge.
Twitter: @BraedenACollins
Finding a Needle (and Other Minor Abandonments)
I
Someone in my town discarded a needle in the back alley. Could it be? I can tolerate alcoholics. They’ve been here since the beginning, when the town consisted of a couple wagon wheels and a box of inoperative ammunition; when something analogous to a cowboy nailed together another room after the church was built, called it a saloon, and stirred the mash on the stubble grass in the moonlight. There’s still cowboys who kick away empty, stinking beer cans to get to their brake pedals. My ex drank so much I had to wipe his ass for him the last year of his life. He was forty five. I dealt with it like this: it’s as though he were the wolfman. This tendency was just baked into him, inexorably, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. There’s no silver bullets around here and it’s a fusion and one part cannot live without the other. Somewhere along the line, people started smoking marijuana. Now I smell skunk when I go for my evening walks down the back alleys -- it comes from garages with peeling paint, the smoke licking up from the gap under the door. I bite my tongue. It’s nothing that I want to try but it’s been around so long it’s just normal, like satellite television or the internet. Even my good friend Esther said to me, sheepishly over coffee one day, that she had been smoking some to help the arthritis in her hip and to keep her mind settled. Well I just spooned another bite of cake onto my tongue and changed the subject --back to stuff like the hockey game last night, and just how many more years do my grand-kids have on this earth before it gets a bit too much mold on it. Scrape it off, they always say. Imagine this: the bomb drops, and instead of a mushroom cloud you get a big, lanky toadstool in its stead; it shades the arctic, makes the polar bears cold again. I hear people also eat mushrooms to sort of get their minds out into the nebulae or something. Whatever. Not here. Here they just drink and smoke pot. Maybe. My heart swallowed up all my blood when I saw that needle. It was laying at the fringe of a little puddle in the back alley. I could see my own face, wide-eyed, and then I was looking into the adjacent backyard. The Murrays. Could they? The tip of the needle caught some sunlight, punctured the air. For whatever reason I leaned down and breathed in, wondering if it had a smell to it; something mellow, I expected. Redolent of an old bruised apple peel, perhaps. Junk, they used to call it. Saw in a movie once that they wrap a belt around their arm and dart it in their vein like they’re pegging a candle onto a birthday cake. So I started looking at people’s arms in the grocery store and post office, looking for marks and knicks and bruises. I look in people’s eyes when we’re talking about the weather, looking for a sort of moistness across the sclera. Seems that everybody is in a daze, maybe it’s this heat. Hasn’t rained in five weeks. I can’t have my grand-kids out here if it’s going to be like this; someone has to take responsibility for their family and community. I’m going to find who that needle belongs to and I’m gonna give him, or her, a piece of my mind. I’ll be ready if they start shooting. Esther told me that it was probably an insulin needle. For a diabetic. I’m not listening to those people anymore.
II
The other night I fell asleep in the recliner. It was a tiring day. I had been waiting for a phone call that never did arrive. On the television between my feet, the later edition of the news was playing, rolling through stories and flashing the living room blue. So then I was back in the alley, looking at my face in the puddle. The needle was there, but I wasn’t paying it much attention beyond that nagging feeling you get in the corners of your mind when someone is looking at you. The needle was holding me in its eye like an egg yolk. Me in my bloated clothing. Something in the puddle changed, and next thing I knew my reflection was swelling off the skin of the water. I stepped out of the way, mindful that the needle didn’t end up in the bottom of my running shoes. In that moment--and only that moment--I felt like it was a comrade: we were both watching my reflection grow like a column up into the sky. Two bystanders in communion. But then the needle floated up and the little a-hole pricked my arm and disappeared. Before I realized what had happened, I had become my reflection and I was hurtling up toward the grey sky. Now, this is how things bleed together in dreams. In that half-sleep phase, I was listening to a story on the news about one of the universities in the city. Apparently they’re taking our genes and putting them into other things, making new weird beasts and playing God. That’s the best way I can describe it; I’m not good with science and I never will be. Anyway, it turns out that needle plucked out some of my essence, I felt like a tree missing a leaf. Next thing you know, it dawned on me what I actually was: I was a mushroom. A lanky toadstool, so tall I could feel my head getting cold in the clouds. Down there on the ground--it was like a patchwork, all the dry fields-- I could see my town. It looked like a satellite for the big blinking city further west. But I could only take it in for a few more moments because the mushroom burst and reproduced into a million little spores and they rained back onto the ground. All at once I was in the puddle, the alley, my living room, the post office, the city, the highway, the wolfman’s den... . I was in my grandkid’s house, deep in the city. They stepped on my spores and complained about the sun being shaded; they had wanted to play outside and dance in the puddles. They started pointing at each other with their fingers, like they were little guns. Or needles. After this I woke up with my heart beating hard, wondering if I had remembered to send them their birthday cards this year. I like to think they notice the effort I put in to things, but I don’t know that there is a reward. I haven’t found a needle since. I don’t know what the hell the dream means. Esther told me marijuana eliminates dreams entirely but I’m still not sold on it.
Poetry by Divisha Chaudhry
Divisha Chaudhry is a 21 year old South Asian woman currently pursuing BA English (research) from India. Her writings have been published by Tabula Rasa Review, The Alipore Post, The Phosphene, Verse of Silence, The Horizon Magazine, The Woman Inc, Livewire.in among others. She identifies as a grey-ace and is lover of books, roses and her soulmate. (Editor’s note: you can find Divisha on Instagram @divsinks!)
vampire lust - the essence of living
I have idle hands that touch your veins and blush\we are moving in decimals as the day
stretches over another day\wild-grass and weeds rub my shoulder as I sigh and lie in your
embrace\\ I think I just went missing somewhere between your thighs though I do not
mind that when you offer your heart on a platter\I look for poetry in the crease between
your palms and melt into the softness of our love - a sanctuary of blood oaths and crisp
blue skies and bats paying homage to our meeting \ we pluck pomegranates from the
graveyard and give ourselves to the deluge\red is painted permanently on our teeth and
we ravage in losing ourselves to devotion\there's no one in sight - I look as far as my
eyes can see, our souls are the only one inhibiting human forms and I like how special that
makes me feel\Our limbs dance in the melody this delirium creates\ we gorge to our
appetites and float like vultures set free \ Yesterday, I thought we died in an ending but
today marks another beginning where you and I are living ghosts for eternity.
Watercolour Painting by Angela Patera
Angela Patera is a hobby artist from Lefkada, a small island in Greece. She likes to make art of who and whatever inspires her. With that being said her artwork ranges from fanart of musicians and movie characters to nature, fantasy and horror inspired art. She uses many different mediums, but her favorite are watercolors.
Twitter/Instagram: @angela_art13
Poetry by Phoenix Tesni
Phoenix Tesni (she/her) is a 22 year old poet from New Delhi. She has works published or forthcoming in Limelight Review, hand picked poetry, bloodbathhate, Sage Cigarettes, palest blue, Cloudscent Journal, tigers zine lit, and elsewhere. Phee likes to dedicate her life to creating and consuming art. When she's not doing either of that, she likes to practice falling in love with life over and over again. You can find her on twitter as @PhoenixTesni or her website: phoenixtesni.wixsite.com/home .
the cynic’s love song to indifference
your wife is humming herself into a
Nightdress she never thought she'd wear.
Seven ages ago, I dreamt I'd kissed you
to death. God didn't smile, of course, because
she was still angry about the time
I cursed her for making my mum hurt.
she said, “babygirl, you did that all by yourself.”
My arteries are emptying themselves of all the
Love I have pretended to have, and all the Love
I've pretended to let go of. another monochrome
man makes me laugh, and I, as always,
fall in love. & As is the natural order of things,
I fall out of love, and regret it, again. one Swish
of eyeliner. Four thumbs. I chew the galaxy
open, & spit all of the stars out like seeds; nectar
dripping down my chin like blood-
cardinal & cherry-like. Thank you for reading! Please reach out to the author via their social medias if you enjoyed a piece! <3
Honored to have my art featured! So many lovely works. Congrats on a great first issue 🖤