Ghost period
Then the heat vanished
and she was here again:
my maidenhood, a vestige of her,
come for one more visit
(six months after
what I thought was her last)
to leave behind
her pale pink plush—
barely there, translucent
as a moth’s wing-print.
Just as the tattered heads
of asters, on warm
November days, peek out late
then get snowed over,
she was out of
step with the order of things
but I flickered up to see her anyway
as if meeting an old flame
who’d given no end of trouble
yet still brought stirrings.
She came without throbs
that some might feel
the pelvis a bowl of fire
empty as a phantom limb.
No, this body
declared it was
a kid again, all day
I felt the old currents
cartwheel through
*
Wendy Kagan lives and writes in a converted barn in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Her poems have appeared in The Baffler, Chronogram, and Poetry Distillery. She was named a finalist for the David Wade Hogue Poetry Scholarship “Martha Award” in 2022.
