Tag: ghosts

Ghosts of the American East by Jerry Wemple

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Ghosts of the American East

Market Street’s broad and unbothered sidewalks were meant for those who traversed here long ago. Not now. The A&P closed decades back. Jeweler, corner drugstore, and the other drugstore with the soda fountain all absent. And the cobbler man whose skinny storefront window displayed a silver machine with a rotating drum from which he’d dispense hot peanuts in a paper sack. All now spectral presences only some can see. I was a specter back then. I believed only some could see me. Most animals could: The stray dog wandering the alley. Thick-furred winter rabbits scavenging beneath the backyard bird feeder or huddled under the pines along the fence. The guinea pigs, scuttling amongst the wood shavings in their glass containers at the Woolworth store downtown, could see me as I pressed my face close, looked into their dark metallic eyes. I thought the lady who worked in the sewing and notions section could not see me as she shuffled past, but once she said excuse me as she pushed a wobble-wheeled cart down a cramped aisle.

Two dark-eyed brothers, teenagers, were able to see me and did not like it. I was returning from the candy store where the candy store man only saw me when I was with others, usually a cousin or some other kid. When I was by myself, he’d appear from behind the backroom curtain and disappear behind it again, like he was mistaken, the bell above the door hadn’t rung, I wasn’t fixed before the candy case, a coin clasped in anticipation. I knew then I contained ghost magic because I made sound silent, became invisible in lighted rooms. But those brothers saw me, and chunked sharp words and rocks at me. Some of the words I’d not heard before but understood their meanings. The boys’ faces contorted with jeers. They looked like the television news. I gathered a ripe handful of those rocks and put them in my pocket.

Sometimes I saw others who most did not. I saw a shadow man trail the son of the next-door neighbors six months after he’d returned from war. The shadow man followed him as he walked toward downtown, as he walked toward the bridge, as he walked toward the mill employment office. The shadow man said nothing, said to say nothing. Down at the south end of town where the dam goes across the river, the faint image of a boy bobbed about in the choppy current. His body washed up near the Fishers Ferry landing the summer before. An older cousin died in a motorcycle wreck. I saw him only once, thin as mist, walking at the edge of the woods near the state highway, his head twisted as though he was looking for something.

Mostly that has passed. More people can see me now, can hear me. That’s okay. I talk to them and they to me. The world is different these days. Or so it seems and doesn’t seem, oddly both at once. Still my renegade spirit sees more: my great-grandfather, dead over sixty years, waits in a chair on his porch for me to return from the corner store with a paper sack of red licorice whips. He speaks grumbly German to his wife through an open kitchen window, and they both laugh a little. My mother, passed on before my son turned two, makes her way to bingo at Saint Luke’s parish hall remembering aloud that she was one call away from last week’s jackpot. I try to reconcile these disparate worlds: the one we are in and the one we will join. Now and then I talk things over with Dempsey, my great-grandfather times many. Mostly I do it on walks down by the river with one of the dogs. Dempsey navigates a world where his White father gives him freedom yet sells away his Black mother, where he works to buy his wife, a Congo woman, property of a Huguenot planter who factors the loss of offspring into the price which costs Dempsey months, years. Dempsey tells me not to fret. That I know how the story ends. He eventually bought a mill and died in his sleep with credits in his accounts. I should tend to my own time, he tells me. I understand. Some days I reach in my pocket, then chuck a stone into the rolling water, watch the stone and then its ripples disappear. For now, small gestures like this are the best I can do.

*

Jerry Wemple is the author of four poetry collections, most recently We Always Wondered What Become of You from Broadstone Books. He co-edited, with Marjorie Maddox, the poetry anthologies Common Wealth and Keystone Poetry, both from Penn State Press. He also co-edited, with AD Stuart, Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania from Catamount Press.

Five Poems by Ren Wilding

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Chase All the Ghosts from Your Head

In high school, I recorded a Liz Phair song
off the radio on a cassette— the only love
song I’d heard that didn’t specify gender.
I only played it late at night, volume
so low I had to put my ear against
the speaker. I didn’t know who I wanted
to love me. The first person I fell in love with
burned me a CD of love songs,
the front decorated with sharpie rainbows,
first track The Power of Two by the Indigo Girls
I played it on repeat in my car for months after
we broke up, trying to replace
the heart I forgot on the nightstand
beside their bed where we slept.

* The title is taken from the lyrics of “The Power of Two” by the Indigo Girls.

* 

Bite

You told your boyfriend
to bite you as we watched
The Twilight Zone in your
dorm room. You said he should
bite me too if I wanted. I always
did what you said, and the thought
of you wanting me bitten
made my skin slither. Your
boyfriend’s teeth made rows
of little crescents on my forearm.
I watched your face. You asked
how it felt. I don’t remember
what I said, only that I left
thinking you loved me.

*

Fisherwoman

I forgot my lungs
when I swam from her—
fish scales shiver
my skin

My lips pass seawater,
as barbs
hook me by the jaw.
She reels me from the water—

a dread of air
passes over my gills
in a lacework of burning.

Seaweed strands weigh
me down—
her hands
on my skin again.

She needs to do it right
this time. Scrape
my scales—
become covered
in the sequins
of my body.

Slice and strip my belly
until all that’s left
is the sweetness of me
she wants in her mouth.

I am flotsam
I am gills.
I am gasped air.

*

Origami Dragon

A green-haired girl made me
a paper dragon so small

my hand became its lair.
It couldn’t stop keeling

over on its curled talons—
with each fall, my hand sparked

to think of her fingers folding.
When she gave me a ride

after art class, gold filled
the cavern of my chest.

But I didn’t yet know
I liked girls— no fire

on my breath
to burn her back.

* 

Valentine’s Performance

My belly was full of crackling
eggshells as I helped the girl
working on the student production
of the Vagina Monologues
pass out fliers and ply students with cake.
But I had to leave the carnival
of vulvas to meet my bicurious
art major girlfriend who barely
touched me. I gave her a note
with a pressed violet inside,
and she gave me nothing. All I wanted
was to kiss the theater girl,
our mouths smeared with frosting.

*

Ren Wilding (they/them) is a trans, queer, neurodivergent poet. They are the author of Trans Artifacts: Bones Between My Teeth (forthcoming from Porkbelly Press, 2026) and Trans Archeology (forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review, 2027). Their work appears in Braving the Body (Harbor Editions), Comstock Review, Does It Have Pockets, ONE ART, Palette Poetry, Pine Hills Review, The Second Coming, and elsewhere. They were a finalist for Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Prize, have received a Pushcart nomination, and are co-curator of the Words Like Blades reading series. They hold an MA in Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Missouri.

Two Poems by Vincent Casaregola

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Night at the Convenience Store

It’s not like there’s something wrong,
not like you’d think—no inner demon
willing me to kill or be killed, inspiring
some direct-to-video tragedy—

what I hear is softer, a whisper
of secrets and the sound of shadows
sliding slowly over hollow space,
someone else’s ghosts, not mine.

Some people broadcast themselves,
and I, despite myself, receive
an endless chain of repetitious fears,
the plainsong of pathetic histories.

At home, at night, the soft sounds
of furnaced air surrounding me,
I’d still find no peace, deafened almost
by the family’s atonal dreams.

So now I work the graveyard shift at the
convenience store, as ghosts come and go,
some in awkward bodies, some in minds,
and a few, just a few, carried on the wind.

*

In the Sunlight

Black letters, “Do Not Cross,”
on shiny yellow tape, rising and
falling on the afternoon breeze,
rustling, surrounding the site

Bright yellow, with black numbers,
the bent plastic markers, just like
what restaurants use to tag the order,
scattered randomly on black asphalt

Brass casings, cast like seed
on hard ground, some still smooth,
some dented, but each one shining
in the hot, late-summer sun.

*

Vincent Casaregola teaches American literature and film, creative writing, and rhetorical studies at Saint Louis University. He has published poetry in a number of journals, including 2River, The Bellevue Literary Review, Blood and Thunder, The Closed Eye Open, Dappled Things, The Examined Life, La Piccioletta Barca, Lifelines, Natural Bridge, Please See Me, WLA, Work, and The Write Launch. He has also published creative nonfiction in New Letters and The North American Review. He has recently completed a book-length manuscript of poetry dealing with issues of medicine, illness, and loss (Vital Signs) that has been accepted by Finishing Line Press.

EASTHAM by Royal Rhodes

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EASTHAM

Here on the outer Cape
near the last windmill
are scrub pine and sand bars
near tide pools we walked
in ankle-deep warm water,
and found horseshoe crabs,
moon snails, razor clams,
and tangled knots of seaweed.
This is the flung-out arm
of the bay that beckoned
the hungry pilgrims and Nauset
in their first encounter,
where both, surprised,
ran off, over round stones
rubbed smooth by tides.
The gray heavens or clouded
blue air fills with low
flotillas of observant gulls,
as if visiting ghosts
from some invisible realm.
Here understanding grows
and stuttering love
outlasts the soon altered.
In each summer season
mourning doves croon
love from the few trees
with hours wearing away
where we have sat still,
here with the world’s weight
as night comes too soon.

*

Royal Rhodes is a poet who lives in retirement in rural Ohio. His poems have appeared in: ONE ART, Last Stanza, Amethyst, Ekphrastic Review, The Montreal Review, and others. His poem, “Solstice”, was issued as a poetry and art collaboration broadsheet by The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina.

Four Poems by Sandra Kohler

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Having lost it…

When I tell my therapist about having lost it completely three days ago
when my husband gets angry at me because I’ve left a cabinet door open
and he bangs his head on it, says it’s something I’ve done before, I
tell her I don’t understand what set me off so completely, so that
I scream I can’t stand it, threaten to leave, to kill myself, outrageous
unforgivable behavior, and why, all because of his understandable
irritation at the end of a long siege of frustrations, stress, anxiety
in these awful pandemic days.

What was this about, I ask, and she asks me. “My mother,” I say. That
answer that we all come up with in the end, unless it’s “my father.” But
for me, it was her, not him. And somehow, I don’t know how, I have
reached, in these days, a kind of grim unrecognized decision: I reject
her definition of me, my life. I don’t want ever again to feel guilty or
unworthy or incompetent, I am done, finally, with apologizing for my
existence.

*

Recognition

I’m thinking this morning, as I often
do, of my wish that my husband and I
had known each other decades earlier,
ages before we met, middle-aged, with
years of living behind each of us. But
today for the first time I realize I’ve been
wrong, we do have that knowledge.

Each of us still carries the young self
we were inside, bringing a childhood,
a parentage, family, first marriage, years
of living adult lives. Here and now, in
the present, we see, hear, feel aspects of
that life, that person in the other. Here
and now, in this relationship, we are
each all the selves we’ve ever been.

*

Vanishing

Climbing a steep hill of iced-over
snow in front of a public building,
library of some kind, I know I have
to extract one book from the depths
of the mound, it’s what I’m here for.
The rest has vanished. We vanish
and don’t. We are alive in the dreams
of others, or dead, dreams which may
be closer to nightmare than dream,
or not. We are strange familiar ghosts
becoming apparitions, visitations.

I lose a hearing aid, the key to my
house, an hour, a morning, a slip of
paper with the name of the nostrum
that could save me, a child’s first all-
accepting love, a friendship that was
never whole but whose fractures still
beckoned. I lose my sense of humor,
my sense of proportion, my way,
my whereabouts, my why.

Do I have anything left to say? Of
course. Do I know how to say it? Of
course not. It’s the not which gives me
the knot to unpick, whose threads can
be woven into patches, forming a
patchwork which can be sewn into
a fabric which will be a statement
of something I don’t know I know.

*

What Follows

After ten years of living here, I still
don’t know the weather, its patterns,
where it comes from. Or the domestic
weather: my daughter-in-law’s moods.

Talking to her about the garden, I get
what I’ve asked for and then don’t know
what to do with it. I can accept or reject
it. Whatever. What would whatever be?

There are grave limits not on what I
can want but on how much I can have.
The sky says anything can come along
and will, but not what or where. Our

roses are blossoming today as if there
is no tomorrow. If they’re right I should
be attending not to weather but whether:
what can I create from today’s offerings?

*

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music, (Word
Press) appeared in May, 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of
Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing, (University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including
The New Republic, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many
others over the past 45 years. In 2018, a poem of hers was chosen to be
part of Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation at the new Comcast
Technology Center in Philadelphia.