Adventures of Ghost Girl
Ghost Girl misses
the taste of sweetness:
canned peaches, honeysuckle stems,
the rim of raspberry jam.
Ghost Girl sucks a finger bone
to remember. She longs
for the feeling of slipping
between fresh sheets & lying there
like a clean corpse.
For fun, she knocks the plants
off their sills in your apartment
& blames it on the cat.
Ghost Girl swallows bells
so somebody might hear her.
She drifts through the city
but nobody stops her to ask for help.
She wants to ask for help.
Ghost Girl feels like the tap
of a slowly pressed piano key
before the hammer sounds—
everybody notices the note instead.
Sometimes Ghost Girl rides
on top of the train & the wind
goes right through her.
Every time Ghost Girl falls in love,
instead of butterflies, the bells
in her stomach stutter. When
Ghost Girl rides in the train car
with the rest of us, she falls in love
with the woman with elegant fingers
& a puppy on her lap & the stranger who’s falling
in love with the woman’s puppy.
Ghost Girl falls in love with the sleeping
boy & the kissing couple & the baby who
is falling in love with a stranger’s face.
Ghost Girl falls in love & the bells
in her stomach shiver & sing. O if you listen,
you might hear them over the sounds
of the tracks & the city & living things
at the next stop.
Ghost Girl Visits the Cemetery
Not the one where she’s buried. Another one.
A black car drives too quickly
through Ghost Girl and oak leaves
swirl up, flustered.
Snow clings to stone.
Over there: a muttering birdwatcher.
Ghost Girl settles on a favorite grave
and tells the stranger inside:
You were in my dream last night.
It was nice & most of the people died
a beautiful death.
The stranger stays dead, doesn’t respond.
The bells in her stomach toll.
Et tu, stranger?
Ghost Girl Visits the Cemetery Again
She haunts the groundskeeper’s son,
who cleans fallen sticks & listens
to Bowie through headphones.
The cemetery is silent except for
Ghost Girl singing along to the boy
singing along to “Heroes.”
The bells in her stomach clamor
a catastrophe of joy.
The two of them mangle the song.
(It can’t be helped: Bowie rolls in his grave).
Later, she climbs the chapel bell tower—
the bells, too, are long dead—
but Ghost Girl likes the view,
so full of lights & lives passing.
(It’s the human stories, reader,
that she loves to collect).
M Jaime Zuckerman is the author of two chapbooks, most recently Letters to Melville (Ghost Proposal, 2018) as well as poems in Diode, Fairy Tale Review, Hunger Mountain, Palette, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. She serves as the associate editor for Sixth Finch and a senior reader for Ploughshares. She grew up in the woods but now lives and teaches in Boston, MA.
Twitter: @JaimeZuckerman Instagram: @jaime.zuckerman
Photo by Brett Sayles from Pexels