tHE aFTERGLOW*

Pumpkins strew in the ballyhoo, scabby rotting viscera. We took hockey sticks to the orange carcases, a sarcophagus best smote with a well-angled hook, sticky seeds and stringy bowels, pock guts and corm, a tuberose mess. The streets were a graveyard of orb and shrubbery, an embittered jack-o-lantern giving me the scornful eye, my friends re-taping their sticks, my mother hollering, ‘time for supper’, the streetlights dimming, pumpkins festering in the placental afterglow.