Poetry: Selections from PJ Grollet

the hotel maid said no

 

I woke up in the hotel room and

lain next to me in the bed—the maid.

she was in a deep sleep, didn’t respond

 

when I nudged her to wake. I called the

front desk, to complain. “we’ll do our

best to get her up,” said the agent, “but

 

expect from housekeeping—poor service

for the rest of your stay.” what is this?

I thought to myself and then the woman,

 

an older, black lady, popped out from under

the covers. she had slept in the maid uniform

—a classic black and white—but now

 

awake, she wore a neon spandex tank and

biker shorts and what a woman she was!

makeup on, hair braided and beaded whilst

 

her body pressed, struggled against the nylon

stretch. I went to kiss her straight away; her

tongue and mouth cold, like she’d been

 

sucking ice. I pawed at her ass and haunches,

pulled her in close and grinded my erection

into her, through my boxer briefs. we

 

continued like that—to the bathroom; ready

to fuck, I grabbed a hold of her wrist, placed

her hand on my cock, when calmly she said,

 

“no. I can’t do this.”

black rites in a Sunday

 

the feature story in this week’s

Parade magazine profiled a woman

from England with long white hair,

a priestess, who ministered  

bizarre black masses.

 

the piece included multiple photos

of the woman and of her rituals too.  

 

she and her disciples cloaked themselves in

hooded black robes and performed their

unholy rites underneath ominously shaped,

mirrored chandeliers which emanated a

macabre sort of power, a strength

onto the celebrants of the black mass.

 

through the sorcery, a handful of the

higher initiates transfigured into

hellish, black-wet lizard creatures.

 

the priestess was quoted, “I am here to bring

darkness into the world.”

 

yikes, I said to myself, who thought this

would be a good article for the Sunday paper?

a man recounted the following story to his woman:

 

“during my time in Vietnam, a young boy helped

the team; he must have been 12 or 13 when I

first met him. the kid was mentally unstable,

sadistic even, but I promised to bring him over

after the war. otherwise, he would have been

killed for sure.

 

by the time we cleared out, the boy was 15 or 16.

he was a big kid, would have played linebacker and

he wore his hair long, down to his shoulders.

 

a family here in the States agreed to take him in.

a family with young children and I never told them

anything about the boy; not about what he’d

seen, or done.

 

for a while, things were okay until one afternoon,

the kid went psychotic and savagely bludgeoned,  

sodomized their two young boys in the playroom.”

 

“oh my God!” his woman screamed. “how could

you do that? that’s your fault! that’s all on you!”

 

the man needed to unburden himself of his story and

his woman claimed she wanted for him to open up. the

blowback of repulsion was unexpected, crushing.

 

as the man packed his things to move out, he

considered how these shared living arrangements

never seemed to work out for him.

PJ Grollet is the scribe for the five-volume series, The Book of Dreams and has been published in Horror Sleaze Trash, Stereo Stories, āraśi, and Bare Back Magazine.