Tag: Mary Simmons

The Candle in the Mirror by Mary Simmons

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The Candle in the Mirror

Every good ghost story begins with a girl
in the dark. I count to ten,
but I do not close my eyes,
because I do not intend to find you.
The bath is still running.
The tile is littered with wet lilac petals.

The mirror swims in candles, a thousand
fires worth a dollar twenty-five, dying
faster than I am. I watch myself
dying each day, each of us dying each day.
The wax sputters. The bath is still running.
I am solving your riddles

on the back of my eyelids.
Parliaments of owls
melt down the fogged window.
I could reach into each beak,
draw out each handful of fire,
burn the feathers and call this creation.

Listen: this is the naming of corvids.
This is the morning of bones.
And I say, listen: there is nothing
but faces that do not belong to us.
The bath fills with glass, dripping
between my fingers, faucet leak

lullaby from the other room.
What is a woman if not a ghost?
What is a ghost if not a processional
of candles? We chant their names
in the dark. The bath overflows.
Wallpaper drinks, as though this is love.

*

Mary Simmons is a queer writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is a poetry MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she is the managing editor for Mid-American Review. She has work in or forthcoming from tiny wren lit, Moon City Review, Yalobusha Review, Whale Road Review, and others.

Winter Remains by Mary Simmons

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Winter Remains

When waking, the dream
is lost. When opening a door,

winter peals: is there warmth enough
to flood these ghosts?

Numbness changes color
in a kitchen with the oven cracked.

Ice thaws in eyelashes, through hair,
on lips that failed to catch snowflakes

between them, on coats, turning to pearls.
In artificial light, a body transforms

back into a body, and the lost no longer
look through us. I seek shelter

in the spaces where even I cannot find
anonymity and those footfalls belonging to—

what? I am drawing circles around us, creating
our private universes and naming them

friend to all and she who wants to
understand too much.

I open a window to invite winter in
in branches only, in those arms

that may have loved us once.
The window open all night, I dream

snow, drifting down the hall,
and never grow cold.

*

Mary Simmons is a queer poet from Cleveland, Ohio. She is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she also serves as an assistant editor for Mid-American Review. She has work in or forthcoming from Exist Otherwise, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Shore, and The Santa Clara Review.