When is it a haunting, and when a premonition?
I feel more haunted by the ghosts of the present
than the past. Some have stopped responding
when I call; and there are those that message or
text at all hours. After I get off the line with them,
I am nearly always doubled over with sadness;
their voices carry so much suffering, and I am
skewered by my inability to make their pain
go away. This is how I know the ancestors
do not become gods or angels when they
pass from our midst— rather, we are warp and
woof in a fabric stretched and threaded through
with our shared griefs. But o, for a hundred moth-
mouths, to work on a rending that admits more light.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
