War - Dark Poems by Alessandro Manzetti and Marge Simon

 Release date: June 8, 2018

Subgenre: Poetry Collection

About War - Dark Poems:

 

Look in my eyes. My bronze skin reflects the flames of the battles.

I feed on bullets and shrapnel.

I have trenches instead of veins and a bombardier’s whirring plays my favorite symphony inside my big head. This is my story, with some of my best camouflages and disguises, and you should expect your peace plans to fail. Because that's what I do for living.

Look at my million golden teeth necklace. Ring any bells? Maybe you’re too young. I probably should have mentioned the fireworks over the Baghdad night sky, my new friend, or the live broadcast of two great skyscrapers disintegrating. You know what I'm talking about, right? So, you can call me by one of my many names: Great General, Lock-box of the Powerful, Red Rain, Lord of Steel or, more simply, WAR.

I appear as strife of many kinds, from Stalingrad to Scotland. Africa to Afghanistan, the civil war of Italy and the War Between the States, ghostly wars, drug wars, the battle of the sexes, World Wars I, II and visions of a holocaust yet to come. It’s all herein and more, with poems both collaborative and individual.

Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.

Excerpt:

 

MISS SAIGON

 by Alessandro Manzetti and Marge Simon

Saigon, Summer 1969

Lin Hoa is dancing for us

dressed in a leather miniskirt

showing her teenage breasts

by raising and lowering

her t-shirt that says

‘Black Clap’ in golden letters.

She's playing with us, she smiles

and grabs my beer to have a little sip;

a healthy 14-year-old girl like her,

with those perfect white teeth,

can’t host the black eggs of syphilis.

It's still too early for her,

even in this overturned paradise,

in this city where dust

doesn't have time to settle down

before disappearing

dragged away together with the corpses.

‘300 piastres’,

she whisphers into my ears,

and then into those of my drunken comrades,

their hands shaking in attempts

to capture non-existant black butterflies

— it's not time to pull the trigger, dude!—

circling the red light bulbs

up there, hanging above

this luminescent roof of Saigon,

so far from the jungle.

darkened by the open mouth

of a hungry ground.

But death can wait, over there

with its shining helmet of tomorrow

which we mistake for a new moon.

Upstairs in a certain yellow room

with a pink radio tuned to Radio Hanoi,

I discover that Lin Hoa

has a special moon of her own

tattooed around her navel.

She giggles when I touch it,

pushes my face down to her crotch.

begging me to enter her special place,

so tight, so fresh and new,

she moans and says I’m the best

she’s ever known as my dick meets

the razor blades within her sweet young cunt.

Through a mist or red hot pain, I’m aware

before she disappears, she upps the volume,

Hendrix blasting Purple Haze

to drown out my screams.

I know I won’t be pulling any trigger,

should have been chasing

those black butterflies

instead of Saigon tail.

 

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About Alessandro Manzetti:

 

Alessandro Manzetti lives in Trieste (Italy). He is the author of more than twenty books in English and Italian, including works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. His poems and stories have appeared in Dark Moon Digest, The Horror Zine, Disturbed Digest, Illumen, Devolution Z, Recompose, Polu Texni, BONES III, RHYSLING ANTHOLOGY (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018), HWA POETRY SHOWCASE Vol. 3 and 4, THE BEAUTY OF DEATH Vol. 1 and 2, BEST HARDCORE HORROR OF THE YEAR Vol. 2 --to name a few. His poetry collection Eden Underground won the Bram Stoker Award 2015, and his poetry collections Venus Intervention (with Corrine De Winter), Sacrificial Nights (with Bruce Boston) and No Mercy were nominated for the Bram Stoker Award.

 

Website

About Marge Simon:

 

Marge Simon lives in Ocala, FL. She edits a column for the HWA Newsletter, "Blood & Spades: Poets of the Dark Side," and serves on Board of Trustees. She is the second woman to be acknowledged by the SF &F Association with a Grand Master Award. She has won the Bram Stoker Award, the Rhysling Award, Elgin, Dwarf Stars and Strange Horizons Readers’ Award. Marge’s poems and stories have appeared in Silver Blade, Bete Noire, Urban Fantasist, Daily Science Fiction, YOU, HUMAN, CHIRAL MAD 2,3,4 and THE BEAUTY OF DEATH Vol. 1 and 2 --to name a few. She attends the ICFA annually as a guest poet/writer and is on the board of the Speculative Literary Foundation.

 

Website