Who Were You When You Were Not Haunted?
My ghost is not the same
as she was in my mouth.
She is warm now. She steams
from my throat in the silver-blue fog.
I feel my feathers curl into the fingers
of the oaks. My feet web clumsily
over the stone-clotted ground. With the coin
in my hand, I can almost conjure her name.
Two plain letters pressed into the flesh
of my thumb. Was she once a word?
A story? I don’t remember. I live
with her velvet softening in my veins.
She and I are all one braided band,
memory of night matter stretched
into silk-gut wire. I speak in beaked
sentences, wild weather throttling my throat.
She sleeps curled in my torso, slender neck folded
between my lungs. The two hard marks
grow hot in my palm. She shuffles through
the branches. A sigil blinks open in the snow.
as she was in my mouth.
She is warm now. She steams
from my throat in the silver-blue fog.
I feel my feathers curl into the fingers
of the oaks. My feet web clumsily
over the stone-clotted ground. With the coin
in my hand, I can almost conjure her name.
Two plain letters pressed into the flesh
of my thumb. Was she once a word?
A story? I don’t remember. I live
with her velvet softening in my veins.
She and I are all one braided band,
memory of night matter stretched
into silk-gut wire. I speak in beaked
sentences, wild weather throttling my throat.
She sleeps curled in my torso, slender neck folded
between my lungs. The two hard marks
grow hot in my palm. She shuffles through
the branches. A sigil blinks open in the snow.
September / October, 2022
Iris A. Law is a poet, editor, and educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area. A Kundiman fellow whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as the New England Review, The Margins, and Waxwing, she also edits and is cofounder of Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry. Her chapbook, Periodicity, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013.
Art: Madge Evers. Dreaming of Asahi. Mushroom spores on paper.