Tasted

A horror poem for the season.

The chill air gnawed my limbs with teeth I could not see.
We sat beneath the light post’s jaundiced eye,
its sickly halo bleeding into black,
just talking—our last human sounds.

The stoop beneath us, cold as a mortuary slab,
drew heat from flesh that hadn’t learned
it was already meat.

Crickets shrieked warnings pitched below hearing,
their frequencies burrowing to the brainstem
where prey remembers itself.
Sunset didn’t linger—it fled.

The evening did not fall. It thickened.
It grew skin, fat,
pressed against us like a body without a face,
breathing where we could not see.

Hushed, the world tightened—
like a throat as its windpipe closes,
like earth shoveled heavy onto coffin lids.

Our words rotted mid-air,
syllables collapsing into carrion,
drawing something hungry
from the underneath places
where geometry fractures.

Whispers stitched the silence—
thin as sutures, fine as spider silk—
the sound of joints bending
in directions they should not.

She squeezed my hand, or tried.
Her fingers had already gone
to the country fingers never return from.

The massive black thing was not a creature.
Creatures have shape.
This was shape’s undoing,
a hole in the world that bled wrongness,
seeping from shadow
like pus from an untreated wound.

It ended before her heart could know—
but hearts know.
They always know.
They just have no mouths to scream with.

Mine kept beating long enough
to feel her pulse gutter out in my palm,
long enough to understand
the chill air had never been nibbling.

It had been tasting.