I am not a difficult woman to haunt.
I relish the company. in the misty evenings, when the cool blue night curls around my ankles, and the strange new light flickers like ghosts across my empty floor, i’ll invite those old ghosts into my bed. i’m easy, maybe, starved for fodder for my famished imagination - I can turn the most rotten fruits into poems. I have always believed in ghosts more than I have believed in death. everything has a certain staying power, and i’m known to return clothing to the consignment store, because someone else was still wearing it. and how can I talk about ghosts without talking about my father’s mother tongue? that flickers in the back of my throat, slithers from my mouth in a bad accent, a hissing snake of a country my children may never know. and how can I talk about ghosts without talking about trees? the way they shudder and sigh the life out of themselves every september? the way death has hanged from their gnarled grasp, the way they cast shade over even the driest, most brittle bones. believing in ghosts is a special kind of labor. it’s a certain practice of seeing everything In the almost-past tense (and the almost-present). I read somewhere that every photograph is a little death. we snap the shutter, write the poem, blink our eyes - and we etch the tombstone. le petit mort. sorry for killing the moment.
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journal entriessome poems, some prose, some in-between Archives
October 2020
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