Tag Archives: crime

Simon MacCulloch, ‘As Yet Not Come to Life’

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The chain between your ankles clanks upon each creaking stair
As you ascend from cellar depths through shadowed drops to where
I lie behind my bedroom door. A cartoon ghost, you seem,
Come dragging from a TV tale to shamble through my dream
Then out the waking end, with chains a-rattling, bones stripped bare.

No doubt you have a story of your own; it isn’t mine,
And if you have a role for me it’s one I must decline.
I’ve never been a Montresor, a Scrooge is not my style,
(I may not lack the malice but I surely lack the guile).
I hide no guilt of which a ghost might form the outward sign.

Well, yes, there’ve been some peccadilloes (now you’ve reached the landing),
But nothing on the scale I sense your bloody bones demanding.
The murders I have dreamed of I have quailed from in the doing,
The chances I have missed the only fuel for my rueing.
There’s nothing you can lay before the door at which you’re standing.

And yet this door is opening slowly – slowly in you come,
Your grin as final as the grave, your empty skull as dumb,
Your only sound the rusty crepitation of the chains
That drape the fleshless network of your hollowed-out remains.
There’s nothing in you – mine the depths your pitted sockets plumb.

And now I grasp your import, and I shake with joy and dread.
For what was it that Shakespeare’s Earl, in dark foreboding, said?
“Such things” (our present seeds) “become the hatch and brood of time”.
And thus I birth the spectre of my destiny in crime.
Strike off your chains – my deeds to come will raise you by their dead!

*****

Simon MacCulloch writes: “As Yet Not Come to Life” takes as its starting point an image that terrified me as an infant. It was in a televised, animated adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – at one point, the ghost of Marley is shown mounting a staircase  towards Scrooge’s room, and we are shown only the skeletal lower legs as they slowly ascend the steps, inhibited by shackles round the ankles. This image became the main focus of my typical childish bedtime fears for a long while afterwards and has never been quite forgotten. I hope to take it to my grave, though not just yet.”

‘As Yet Not Come to Life’ was first published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

“Simon MacCulloch has published hundreds of poems in a variety of outlets, including literary, academic, genre, humorous and religious publications. He lives in London. His Lovecraftian sonnet sequence, The Eyes of Azathoth, is due from Jackanapes Press in October 2026.

“Marley with Chains figurine” by Peter E. Lee is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Maryann Corbett: ‘The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’

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Crime scene dioramas created as teaching tools by Frances Glessner Lee
Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Well-behaved voyeurs
bend above these exquisite
dollhouse miniatures

where the small-scale poor
die in ’40s dailiness.
Blood speckles a floor

tiled in one-to-twelve
scale. Ditto bath fixtures, beds,
plates shocked from a shelf—

Here’s a girl’s sliced neck.
Here’s another, legs jutting
from a tub, freaklike.

Is this Dresden head
brush-tipped with the purpling
livor of the dead?

To appreciate
such intently crafted pain,
one must contemplate

finger-cramping care:
quarter-inch-high postcards, penned
with a single hair.

A close eye for sin’s
rigor vitae: tiny socks
hand-knitted with pins.

Strict detail is key.
Look there for the rage of God.
Search for that and see,

sisters. As will I,
taken with the pains by which
quiet women die.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “In the autumn of 2018, I visited Washington, D.C. to speak at Catholic University, and while I was there, my sister-in-law took me to visit the Renwick Gallery. Its permanent displays are all lovely, but what stayed with me was a visiting exhibition: the Nutshell Studies. The quaintness of the doll-sized views and the perfection of craft in the recreated period interiors contrasted eerily with the bloody crimes laid out in them. They all stayed with me for a long time, and I did more digging about their creator and her work. The resulting poem—in haiku stanzas, because a small form seemed appropriate—was first published in Pangyrus. It’s included in the book In Code, which centers on my years in the Revisor’s Office but talks about all sorts of social evils.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creating of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks, five full-length collections already published, and a forthcoming book. Her fifth book, In Code, contains the poems about her years with the Revisor’s Office. Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry 2018.

Her web page: maryanncorbett.com

Photo: “Murder is Her Hobby Exhibition” by massmatt is licensed under CC BY 2.0.