Poetry

Your Ghost

/ Katrina Kaye

Katrina Kaye

When I wake
your ghost is sitting
on the bedroom window sill.
The one the dog chewed through
that we never got around to fixing.

She plucks teeth marks with pale fingers,
glancing through the corners of eyes
pretending not to follow my movements.

She watches me rise,
and I resist the urge to tell her to look away
as I slip into robe and socks.

The last time I asked her to make me some coffee,
her face blackened to sorrow before she faded away.

I do not ask her for anything anymore.

Your ghost does not frighten me.
I am not the least bit startled when I see her
passing me in the hall,
drinking from the carton,
laying on the couch in the dim of morning.

I catch her staring a little too long,
stainless gray iris reflecting my face.
Unconditional patience woven
into the tangle of veins in the length of her reach,
wanting nothing more than the
contentment of touch.

She does not glare at the Spanish moss
webbed from regrets that hang
along my limbs.

She does not acknowledge
the crust of contrition
I have manifested inside
the lines of my face.
She sees me precious, unsullied,
as she promised she always would.

As an act of atonement,
an apology for my life after your death,
an attempt to weave back into you,
I’ve wrapped your ghost
around my body like loose ribbons,

desperate
to recreate your arms snaked around me,
to feel your exhale on the crook of my neck,
to taste the pulp of your skin with the plum of lip,

wanting nothing more
than the contentment
of touch.

“Your Ghost” is previously published in The Fall of a Sparrow (2014).

Fish

/ Katrina Kaye

Katrina Kaye

You beg.

Flip around
dry earth,
crunch up
stretch out.

Your eyes
swim
screams.

Large,
unblinking,
desperate to
understand.

I watch
sore and silent.
Knowing how
touch is
foil to freedom.

My darling,
please breach
the soil
of the solid
and return
to river bed.
And when you do,
take me with you.

We all ache
for rescue.
Easily confused by
the comfort of
trembling hands.

I too
am often
left to dry
on sun cracked rocks
skinned of scales
left to my bones.

You are not
the only one.

“Fish” is previously published in Rabbits for Luck (2016).

Home

/ Katrina Kaye / Leave a comment

Katrina Kaye

I look for you the way I always have.

Listen to your voice
sing incantations of my youth,

eager to hear news of your religion
in the cadence mucked in the back of throat.

They lost you in the backyard.
Misplaced your skull,
body deteriorated into earth.

I miss the way you wrap around me.
A feeling thick as a childhood home,
a place where awkward flows a little more free
and body moves in familiarity.

You spoke of it.

I’ve given up on a search for home.

I focus on climbing your tree.
Washing the smell of your cigarettes from my pillows.
Stretching upwards in long clean arcs
hoping you will feel the tops of my out-stretched fingers.

The imprint of you:
a hollow through the center of me,
only cured by the scent of you in my kitchen,
and the radiation of your body as it sits
three feet from mine.

I search for your bones in my garden,
mud caked and brittle,
hopeful there may be a piece of you there:

a shard I can wear on a string
proudly around my neck,

your souvenir on my chest,

and when people ask,
I’ll say it reminds me of home.

“Home” is previously published in The Fall of a Sparrow (2014).