HAUNTING

We got it backwards. The dead
don’t haunt us. We
haunt them. We follow them around
in our bathrobes,
with our votive candles,
our palms offered up to clouds,
waking them at odd hours
to dredge up the past.
Did you love us enough? we ask.
Did we love you enough? we ask.
The times we laughed together
they no longer find funny.
The times we cried together
stir up nothing.
Staring into a sink or looking up
from a mattress,
we torment them
with our irascible questioning,
our milky moods that skulk through
the deserted playground of our minds.
Still, we beckon them
watch us weep into our pillows.
Who can blame them
for hating us and our petty desire
for answers, for forgiveness, for closure?
They look at us the way me might
look at insects trapped in amber,
wrapped as we are
in our heavy loneliness.
We are more dead to them
than they to us.
They have better things to do
than mope around the house.
They’ve gotten over us.
We’ll never get over them.

*

Henry Israeli is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Our Age of Anxiety (White Pine Poetry Prize: 2019), and god’s breath hovering across the waters, (Four Way Books: 2016), and as editor, Lords of Misrule: 20 Years of Saturnalia Books (Saturnalia: 2022). His next collection, Between the Trees (or the Lonely Nowhere) will be published by Four Way Books in 2028. He is also the translator of three critically acclaimed books by Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Plume, and The Harvard Review, as well as several anthologies including Best American Poetry 2025. Henry Israeli is also the founder and editor of Saturnalia Books.