Jennifer deBie won First Place in the Scary Art Show Poetry Contest (Dublin Arts Collective, curated by Viewless Wings), with her poem “Bogeyman”.


Bogeyman (After the Texarkana moonlight murders, 1946)
by Jennifer deBie

Shhh

Never talk about the murders
all the people that were got
nor the way that we were failed
by the rangers and the cops.

Never talk about the man
with the feed sack on his head.
You’d know him if you saw him
and you’d likely end up dead.

So don’t talk about the park 
where he shot that couple straight,
nor the house out in the bottoms
where the woman got away.

No, don’t talk about the ranger
sent from Austin city.
How he failed us and he knew it
and the fallout wasn’t pretty.

Called himself the Lone Wolf:
‘wouldn’t leave ‘til he were caught;’
then slipped out eight months later
when the manhunt turned up squat.

But not the manhunt neither,
the widest in the South
and the way it turned up nada
just some rumors and some doubts.

Never talk about the year,
dusty decades dead and gone,
when our people locked their doors
and they kept their porch lights on.

Never talk about the murders,
not a single whispered word
cause he’s out there, he’s still waiting
and believe you me, he heard.

Hear Jennifer deBie, and the other selected poets, read their poems on The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast:

Viewless Wings Scary Poetry Contest Winners Read by the Poets Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast

Submit your polished poetry for the opportunity of being published on ViewlessWings.com and being interviewed on The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Jennifer deBie is a native Texan living in Ireland where she earned an MA in Creative Writing and recently finished a PhD in Mary Shelley. She has been widely published, with work appearing in anthologies by Raven Chronicles Press, PactPress, and Kallisto Gaia Press, something that neither impresses her cat nor pays her rent.

Her debut novel, The Adventures of Dogg Girl and Sidekick, was published by Dreaming Big Publications in 2020. When not reading, writing, or teaching her seminar on plague and apocalypse literature, Jennifer enjoys typical millennial pastimes like eating brunch and neglecting her blog at jenniferdebie.com