your first year and $16 each year afterwards. I hope you’ll take advantage of this savings—more than 35% off the cover price—and join our bloody little gang. If you’re serious about selling your work to NT —payment is two and a half cents per word—then getting to know the mag is your key to a quick sale.
Till then,
John Glazer
Editor
March 28, 1988
Brian Warner
3450 Banks Rd. #207
Margate, FL 33063
John Glazer, Editor
Night Terrors Magazine
1007 Union Street
Schenectady, NY 12308
Dear John Glazer,
Thank you very much for your encouraging response. Enclosed is a check for four issues of NT . I am eager to receive my first copies. In the meantime, I am sending you three new poems I wrote, “Piece de Resistance,” “Stained Glass” and “Hotel Hallucinogen.” I hope that you’ll find them more to your taste.
Thank you for considering these submissions, and I’m looking forward to receiving my subscription to Night Terrors Magazine .
Sincerely,
Brian Warner
PIECE BE RESISTANCE
When the fork eats the spoon,
and the knife stabs
the face reflected in the plate,
dinner is over.
STAINED GLASS
In the wooden silence
genuflecting fornicators
seek penance and
false-toothed idealists
throw grubsteaks on the offering plate.
light a candle for the sinners
light a fire
Self-pronounced prophet, parable-speaking Protestant
preaches his diatonic dogma,
disemboweling indiscreetly.
supplicate
congregate
the world looks better through stained glass
light a candle for the sinners
set the world on fire
Falsities
Falsities
Falsified factualities;
All sitting like eager sponges,
soaking up the tertiary realities of life.
HOTEL HALLUCINOGEN
Lying in bed contemplating
tomorrow, simply meditating,
I stare into a single empty
spot, and I notice a penetrating
of two eyes looking up and
down and at various odd angles
secretly inspecting me; and I
feel my stare tugged away
from the blank screen in
front of my eyes and directed
at the eight empty beer cans
forming an unintentional pyramid.
And I close my lids to think–
How many hours have passed
since I constructed such an
immaculate edifice of tin?
Or did I create it all?
Was it the watchers?
I open my eyes and return my stare to the pyramid.
But the pyramid has now
become a flaming pyre, and
the face within is my own.
What is this prophecy that
comes to me like a delivery boy,
cold and uncaring of its message,
asking only for recognition?
But I will not fall prey
to this revelation of irrelevance
I will not recognize this perversion
of thought.
I will not.
I hurl my pillow at the
infernal grave, as if to save my
eyes from horrific understanding,
and I hear the hollow clang
of seven empty beer cans,
not eight–
Was it fate that left
one to stand?
Why does this solitary tin soldier
stand in defiance to my
pillow talk of annihilation?
Then, for some odd, idiotic,
most definitely enigmatic reason
the can begins to erupt in a barrage of
whimpering cries.
Does he lament because his
friends and family are gone
or that he has no one
with which to spawn?
They were gone…
But no, that’s not the reason.
It is a baby’s cry of his mother’s
treason.
The screaming fear of abandonment.
And this wailing, screaming, whining
causes the dead cans to rise
and I can’t believe my eyes,
that this concession of
beverage containers is chanting
in a cacophony of shallow rebellion
to my Doctrine of Annihilation
that was discussed in my
Summit of the Pillow (which is now
lost among the stamping feet of the
aluminum-alloy anarchists).
I am afraid, afraid of these
cans, these nihilistic rebels.
As the one approaches–the baby cryer,
I suppose my fear
Elliot Paul
Whisper His Name
Norah-Jean Perkin
Paddy Ashdown
Gina Azzi
Jim Laughter
Heidi Rice
Melody Grace
Freya Barker
Helen Harper