Welcome Hauntings – Dream Hauntings
Welcome Hauntings submissions!
This painting came about as a response to a piece of music I know very well- one could indeed say it haunts me- and that I often wonder what it would be like to “inhabit”. – Theodore Nisbett
Artist Bio
Theodore Nisbett is a London-based artist, writer, and musician with a diverse creative practice. He is endlessly fascinated by how physical space and time can be experienced in the imagination and memory, and reflected in music and visual art.
by Franziska Götter
You told me, walking down the path by the field
across the metal grid that tried to keep us out at night,
that those mandalas – is that what they’re called?
are like the dancing dots after you look into the sun.
I thought of woven circles blurring
the last of the summer light and sparse trees
until they flee across my vision
and reassemble at one sharp pull.
Nostalgia in ridiculous costumes.
We stumbled to catch all those glimpses
of past and future dreams
only alive in the narrow opening
of the knowing afternoon sky.
In that hour of soft suspension
the stretching weeds are mythical,
floating in anticipation of chaos.
They bend out of proportion
towards the last golden light
and start swimming in the mist.
Those were the moments,
I told you,
when I see the world most clearly.
Words like
woven galleries
come easy.
But the stars dip and drift,
ghosts as fleeting as light.
And when the rosy fingers come,
they stretch but never quite touch.
The dawn is too bright to sleep in
and again, I see that hypnotic dot,
driven but like a hero suspended.
All I can think of now is Ginsberg,
the self-conscious poet, searching in the night.
He does not believe in a path.
It all evolves
as he wanders along the neon supermarket,
conjuring Whitman among the fluorescent light.
But his angel is lost between the isles,
on his odyssey of sleepless nights.
Poet Bio
Franziska Götter is working towards an M.Phil. in Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She writes poetry and short stories, often concerned with haunting and questions of identity and belonging. She is fascinated by all things weird and beautiful. She joined The Charles Causley Trust as a volunteer working in arts management in 2025. Her review of The Cure’s Bloodflowers was published with Manchester-based Confingo Publishing this year.