Killer Nashville Magazine • Fiction

In “Neighbor,” Michael Taylor paints a haunting, atmospheric portrait of a late-night encounter suspended between reality and perception. Through vivid, unsettling imagery and a tone of quiet unease, the poem explores fear, identity, and the possibility that what we glimpse in the darkness may be a reflection of ourselves.

A laborer pauses in a pine grove, struggling against weakness while continuing the quiet, necessary work of cutting stalks so they may grow again. In “Nightplanter,” Al Baron reflects on unseen labor, endurance, and the tension between personal memory and the anonymous work history requires.

In “Enough,” R.J. Stayton captures the moment when despair gives way to surrender and hope. Through spare, powerful lines, the poem explores doubt, emotional exhaustion, and the quiet return of faith that follows when the struggle becomes too heavy to carry alone.

In “Franklin, Alone?” John Grey crafts a haunting meditation on identity, memory, and isolation. Through surreal imagery—frost that deceives, an owl singing backward, and a hare leaving no trace—the poem explores the fragile line between reality and forgetting. As the speaker questions whether the name “Franklin” belongs to him or merely to the room around him, the poem drifts into a quiet psychological mystery about the erosion of self.

In “Butterflies,” Holly Day twists beauty and decay into a startling meditation on death. Imagining a world where brilliant moths and jewel-toned butterflies emerge from human corpses, this provocative poem challenges our revulsion toward mortality and asks whether transformation would change the way we grieve. Lyrical, unsettling, and philosophical, it confronts the thin boundary between horror and wonder.

In “Barhopping,” Al Baron traces a restless night through numbered bars, blurred memories, and unresolved ghosts. What begins as casual drinking becomes an uneasy reckoning with the past—old wounds, shared trauma, and the illusion of escape. Sharp, surreal, and darkly reflective, this poem explores guilt, repetition, and the way entrances and exits can feel equally impossible.

A man returns to a road he swore he’d never travel again, only to find that memory is louder than silence. In “The Sound That Followed Me Home,” Topher Shields explores guilt, inheritance, and the haunting persistence of unspoken truths through spare, atmospheric verse.

A twilight meditation where landscape, memory, and unease converge. “The Dimmer Glow” moves through dusk and darkness, blurring the line between what is seen and what is remembered, as the mind turns inward and finds meaning not in brilliance, but in the quiet pull of fading light.

A vivid, intimate portrait of Calvin Stowe standing outside Harriet’s writing room, caught between faith, desire, resentment, and reverence, as spiritual devotion and historical contradiction collide in a charged domestic moment.

A tender meditation on devotion, aging, and the quiet vigil of love, Old Faithful captures the midnight hours shared between a person and a beloved dog nearing the end of life. Through intimate imagery and restrained grief, the poem honors loyalty, caretaking, and the ache of staying awake with someone you cannot bear to leave alone.