1. I Do Believe In Spooks The last time I thought about ghosts, I was in a McDonald’s. I had left my grandmother’s house in Des Moines at bedtime, assuming my children would fall asleep in the car, but an unnatural energy possessed them all the way across Iowa. No matter how steadily the engine hummed or how smooth the ride was, no matter what boring talk radio station I tuned into, they did not fall asleep. Eventually they even got hungry. I saw a billboard on I-80 advertising a 24-hour …
Krista has the personality of supermarket cereal—an aggressive love of color and cartoons, easily swayed by sweetness. I make myself indispensable to her, knowing her weakness for chocolate tree stumps and peach chews and Costco tanks of jellybeans. She came over like usual and I unwrapped each candy for her until plastic flossed my teeth. We kiss during the commercials that try to sell us fate in flavors we have yet to taste: new Polly Pockets, grape syrup to help you sleep and sleep, girls …
Things go missing in the nursing home. Helen’s weighted blanket. A letter from her late-husband. An abalone button. A cassette tape of crashing waves she bought at Acadia National Park after she stepped into the ocean for the first time, age fifty-two. A cassette player. A scratchy afghan knitted by she-forgets-who. A photo of herself as a child, mummy-wrapped in jackets and scarves, taken the winter when snow fell so hard it vanished the mailbox, the garden gate, the rhododendron …
Wichita Fridge Day-old fried cheese curds. Three Vortex IPAs. Pickles. More pickles. Low-sodium soy sauce (brand: Dillons), jumbo ketchup, two packs of brown eggs (organic but not free range). Whole milk, low-fat milk, whole cream, half cream. Deviled eggs, butter, one full wasabi tube. Greens going bad. Portland Fridge Trader Joe’s carrot juice. Farmers' market greens. Goat cheese we can’t afford. Beer, beer, beer. Three different hot sauces, full-sodium soy sauce. Bread so dense you …
I put you in this box, like the heart of a bird in my human armpit. Pray every day, face the sun, finger the birch tree I stop at, dogs likely shit on, young people kiss near. Unfamiliar with what you were like at puberty, if you saw the hair come in and kept beat to the steady rhythm, like a chicken’s ascending clucks, or the offbeat clack of clipping nails. So much happens over a toilet. When you fold the paper do you anticipate the wipe or are you able to understand why we’re alive? …
Inpatient Procedure Lord I love to aching all this sweet anonymity, to be a pulse lighting up a picture that is nothing like a face, a list of dosages a clear cup of the correct capsules the right dose of sleep & the right dose of waking, walking, a heart blooded but unburdened of all metaphor for feeling oceaning its waves so cleanly across the screen, I want to slip & sleep under its under, let the body tick off my time & tell each machine I’m fine, I’m …