Edgar Allan Poe would kill to visit my childhood home
by Stacey Forbes
Listen, there are bones in the basement. A murder of crows in the field. Poe would die, if he wasn’t dead already in a gutter where the rain has bashed his brilliant brains in. They say he drank himself to death but I know better. Something bit him. The bones are the tails of squirrels. The backs of rabbits. The head of a deer that looks and looks. It was rabies that killed Poe. Maybe he staggered into the night, absinthe-lit and grieving for Annabel Lee. Maybe booze threw him into the path of a vampire bat after all. Sometimes I drink to boil the bones clean. The elk’s flank. The wild turkey’s claw. Mouths to feed upstairs and hearts in the walls. My father says he hunts for us. In the dream where the rifle taps at the door of this poem, I believe it.
Stacey Forbes won first place in the 2021 Plough Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Fish Publishing Poetry Prize. Her poems are published or forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Terrain, The American Journal of Poetry, Carve, and Split Rock Review, among others. Born in the Pennsylvania countryside, Stacey now lives in Tucson, Arizona.
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Edgar Allan Poe would kill to visit my childhood home”? In literature, my first love was Edgar Allan Poe. My English teacher loved Poe and recited The Bells and The Raven from memory, wild-eyed and gesturing and pacing the room. It was a scary and wonderful chapter in my young life. The pinnacle was a field trip – we drove from my small Pennsylvania town to a theater in New York to see a live performance of The Telltale Heart. I was completely mesmerized. On the ride back I thought, what would Edgar think of our home? My father was an avid hunter, feeding our family venison, rabbits, pheasants and, once, a wild Turkey for Thanksgiving. Skins, furs and bones could often be found in our basement and barn as animals were dressed for the butcher. I had often wondered about their hearts. Their ghosts. It wasn’t hard to imagine heartbeats reverberating in our walls. My small country life and Poe’s vast demons came together in a compression of prose I wrote to express how haunted, and how alive, his work made me feel as a child. Poe helped me give words to the terror and wonder of a child’s mind. I allowed his stories and mine to blend and dovetail together in this piece, the way they did in my imagination.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
05/11 • Chris Pellizzari
05/18 • Chris Clemens
05/25 • Clayton Eccard
06/01 • TBD
06/08 • TBD
06/15 • TBD
06/22 • TBD
06/29 • TBD
07/06 • TBD
07/13 • TBD
07/20 • TBD
07/27 • TBD
08/03 • TBD
08/10 • TBD
08/17 • TBD
08/24 • TBD
08/31 • TBD
09/07 • TBD
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD