The Unseelie Court

By Lorraine Schein

Cackling overhead,

they ride a dark wind,

invert your umbrella in the rain.

Their eyes emit splinters,

cast paper cuts.

They force-feed you insomnia—

days of nightmares,

nights of daymares.

They are the crackling static

of a bad connection.

 A missed bus,

 whose fairy driver

 snaps the door

 shut in your face.

They send the wrong people your way,

the jealous, the coldhearted—

Unseelie, like them.

For ignoring them in childhood,

they inflict you with adulthood.

Blight you with a curse

you don’t believe in—

till it happens.

*

Lorraine Schein is a New York poet and writer. Her work has appeared in VICE Terraform, Strange Horizons, Witches & Pagans, Syntax and Salt, Little Blue Marble, Riddled with Arrows, and in the anthologies Gigantic Worlds, Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana del Rey & Sylvia Plath, and forthcoming in Eighteen: Stories of Mischief & Mayhem. Her story “Sleeping Westward,” in the anthology Visions VII: Universe (Rogue Star Press) was nominated for the 2017 Canopus Award for Interstellar Fiction. The Futurist’s Mistress, her poetry book, is available from mayapplepress.com. “The blood jet is poetry.”