Nicole Yurcaba’s most recent poem to appear here was “There Are No Athiests In Infidelity” (January 2015) 

Roses and Ravens
By Nicole Yurcaba

I keep the Draculas he gives me
taped inside journals,
framed on flat white walls:

the Bela Lugosis and Count
Choculas snipped from pop-culture
magazines and mainstream cereal
boxes by a man who cloaks
red roses in a Crylon Dracula’s cape,
a man who extends his hand
into the gray which craves black,
beckoning the woman whose
all-knowing head,
whose secret-bearing eyes,
don’t want to raise to a world
which casts her, mistaken
for a crow, back into thin-lipped branches.