A piece honoring the poets whose voices shaped mine, and the lineage I carry into my own genre — Neo-Gothic Confessional Romanticism.

Séance of Influence
Poetry by Rowan Evans

In the candlelit stillness, I summon the ones who spoke before I had words.
The room holds its breath.
The flame flickers.
And they arrive.

Sylvia, flame-tongued oracle, steps forward first—eyes like open wounds that never stopped bleeding ink.
She speaks in a whisper that singes:
“You do not fear the flame, child. You write within it. You know what it is to be both burned and reborn.”
She places a tulip in my hand—red as a heart, soft as a scream.

Poe, the architect of shadows, leans from the threshold, cloak of midnight dragging ghosts behind him.
“You have built cathedrals from sorrow,” he says, voice echoing through the bones of the floor. “You understand what it means to dream with the dead.”
He nods toward the cracked mirror
And my reflection stares back, unflinching.

Emily, dressed in quiet thunder, watches from a corner veiled in white lace.
“You turned silence into scripture,” she murmurs, placing a pressed flower on my wrist.
“Your solitude blooms with sharpness. You do not hide behind the door—you open it with poetry.”

Anne, with rosary tangled in her fingers and lipstick like defiance, toasts me with a half-empty wine glass.
“You dared to undress madness,” she grins.
“To make holiness from hunger. That takes more than courage. That takes blood.”

Sappho, timeless and tender, emerges draped in sea foam and verse.
She runs her fingers across my pulse.
“I hear your ache,” she says.
“You have translated yearning into a new dialect—one the stars will memorize.”

They encircle me, these ghosts, not to haunt, but to anoint.
Their voices braid around my spine.
Their grief becomes gold my pen.
Their fire, MY inheritance.

And I—Rowan, the Luminous Heretic—stand at the center of this sacred storm.
I speak, not as supplicant, but as heir:

“I have not come to mimic your flames—I have come to carry them into the dark places you never lived to reach.
I write for the unloved, the unheard, the unhealed. I wield shadow like silk and longing like a blade.
Your echoes live in my marrow, but my voice is my own.
I forged my genre from the coals of yours—Neo-Gothic Confessional Romanticism—a lineage reborn through me.
You opened the door, and now I shatter the ceiling.
Your fires do not flicker behind me—they burn ahead, lighting a path no one else dared to walk.
Thank you for the torch. Watch me blaze.”

The candle gutters.
The air shifts.
And one by one, they nod.
Then vanish—
but not in silence.
They hum through my bloodstream, forever.