horror and grief
In the year following the death of my mother, I wrote a single poem a day for a longer, sustained span of time than ever before. It was the first time I'd ever successfully completed NAPOWRIMO, but then I just kept going for months. Not all the poems were about mothers, some were very much not even about my life at all (I was writing the HH Holmes poems for a spell in there. Part of it was a way to feel more focused, more present in the world. Part of it was a renewed sense of mortality. Soon, I had an entire book about mothers and mothering, some with very gothic undertones, that became my collection FEED.. When my father passed nearly exactly 5 years later, I went through a similar spurt of new poems built around memory and grief that formed segments of RUINPORN. These series and poems were much less about working things out (my relationship with my father being very much less complicated than that with my mother--at least from the standpoint of making art within my grief. ) They jived well with other themes in the overall book and formed the backbone of a collection that also explored societal grief and the loneliness of the internet.
I've always believed that grief is always a kind of haunting--not supernatural, but just as real as any emotion. The sense of unreality. For months, my mother was in my dreams, not knowing she was dead. Sometimes, I knew this and had to tell her. Sometimes, it knocked the wind out of me to be discovering it for the first time. I would wake up startled and sweating and sadder than I'd gone to bed. It waned after a few months, but would still occasionally happen. I chalked it up to the fact that I was not there when she passed, nor did I want to see her body before cremation. I later thought maybe doing so would have stopped the dreams. When my dad died, it was more sudden, a few weeks of decline vs. several months of hospitalization/care center. But I was there for his last breath in the hospital bed. We sat with the body for awhile after he was gone. My brain decided this was enough, and when he appears in my dreams on occasion, that shock and realization doesn't come into play.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, about how horror as a genre gives us permission to explore the darker corners of human experience. And grief? It sometimes lives in those corners. Even if you can't see it, you know its there. When you're grieving, people often want you to be "okay" as quickly as possible. They want the neat narrative arc: sadness, acceptance, moving on. But grief isn't neat. It's messy and recursive and sometimes it looks like a creature that shape-shifts every time you think you've got it figured out. One day it's a whisper, the next it's got claws.
Horror poetry lets you name that monster. It gives you the vocabulary for experiences that polite conversation won't touch. You can write about death not as a gentle sleep but as the violent rupture it actually feels like. You can describe the emptiness as a void that actually swallows things, because that's what it feels like when grief takes your appetite, your sleep, your ability to remember what life felt like before it existed. There's something deeply validating about using dark imagery to describe dark feelings. It's honest in a way that all the usual euphemisms never are.
Gothic literature has always understood that grief and horror are close cousins. Think about all those Victorian poems dripping with mourning imagery—the crumbling estates, the ghosts, the women in white wandering the moors. They weren't being melodramatic (okay, maybe a little). They were trying to externalize an internal experience that defied ordinary description. When Poe wrote "The Raven," he wasn't just crafting a spooky poem. He was writing about the way grief makes you interrogate the universe, demanding answers you know won't come. That bird repeating "Nevermore" is the truth grief forces you to swallow: they're not coming back. No matter how many times you ask.
Horror poetry in the gothic tradition gives us permission to be dramatic about our pain. And honestly? Sometimes grief IS dramatic. Sometimes loss DOES feel like the end of the world. Horror poetry says: yes, it's okay to feel that big about it. One thing I love about horror poetry is how visceral it can be. Grief isn't just an emotion, it's a physical experience. It's the nausea, the insomnia, the way your body forgets how to regulate itself. Horror poetry, with its focus on the corporeal and the grotesque, captures this in ways that other forms of writing might shy away from. You can write about grief as a parasite. As something that hollows you out. As a transformation that leaves you unrecognizable to yourself. You can describe the weight of sadness as literal weight, pressing down on your bones. You can make the reader feel the cold that seems to live in your chest now.
There's somehow comfort in writing dark poetry about dark experiences. When you lean into the horror of grief instead of trying to sanitize it, something releases. You're not pretending to be braver or more resilient than you feel. You're meeting yourself exactly where you are. In the dark. Horror poetry creates a container for feelings that might otherwise overwhelm you. On the page, you can control the monster even if you can't control your grief. You can give it shape, dimension, a beginning and end. And sometimes, when you write something sufficiently dark and true, something weird happens: you feel lighter. Not healed—grief doesn't work that way. But somehow seen or witnessed. Your pain has been acknowledged in its full, terrible reality. My collection, FEED, as a whole, felt this way.
There is, of course, all the classic horror imagery ripe for harvesting—ghosts, hauntings, monsters. You can use them as metaphors for your experience. Write about absence as a presence. Describe memory as haunting. Let yourself be Gothic and melodramatic and dark. Use concrete, sensory details. What does grief smell like? Taste like? What sounds does it make in the quiet of your house? Because here's the truth: grief is a kind of horror story. But it's also a love story. We grieve because we once loved. The monster exists because something beautiful did too. And sometimes, the only way to honor both the love and the loss is to write about them in their full and terrible complexity.
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