Spooky Halloween Poems About Supervillains and Scary Computer Shutdowns…
- At October 30, 2013
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
0
It’s the day before Halloween, so I thought I’d post my yearly spoooooky poem.(For previous years’ spooky poems about zombies and monsters, click here.)
This year’s is about one of my favorite supervillains, Poison Ivy. This poem first appeared at Barrelhouse online. 
For the Love of Ivy
(Poison Ivy Leaves a Note for Batman in the Wake of Another Apocalypse Attempt)
You can see, can’t you, the appeal of such a world – lush with growth,
an earth empty of men’s trampling? In college, sitting through botanical medicine
classes, ecotoxicology, experiments in plant poisons – it became clear
that this was my verité – an orchid dressed to seduce wasps, a blooming
parasite wrapped around the trunk of a tree. You might take me home,
beg me for a kiss, but don’t you see the xylem and phloem in my veins
can’t pulse for you? My only offense not-death, regenerating from venom
fed me by my own professor? Feculent, fecund and feral, my power
you couldn’t understand, being born of cave-dwellers, bats and humans,
and your peculiar love of stray cats. My very existence, perhaps, my only crime
against nature. You can’t stem the murmur of voices under soil,
buried against their will – radioactive trees, GMO fruit. Just consider me
another mutant gone wrong, my betrayals in the distant backstory, my tears
now flow a green ooze as I try to heal the land, cesium in the sunflowers,
goat genes welded into innocent corn. Despite drought and denial,
I will continue to grow unharmed, my defense all delicate leaf and toxic petal.
On another note, you know what else is spooky? All the dang blue screens of death, hard re-boots, and jiggling noises coming out of my almost dead 18-month-old Lenovo Ultrabook. I’m having to replace a laptop before it’s even two years old, and I haven’t dropped it or anything crazy that would account for its general lousiness. Sigh. It must be the season for dying laptops, right in the middle of a bunch of applications and work and such….Scary stuff!
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
