Since it’s published…

I realized I never shared a poem here.

This is the title poem of my collection The Body As Haunted.

Poems are sometimes exorcisms. Sometimes you exorcise a ghost in writing and she still shows up in your living room, now matter how many times you move house. Sometimes I open my mouth and my mother comes out. She watches me constantly, having sworn to live vicariously through me after death, so I make sure we have a good time. Even during sex, she cheers me on and holds up score cards. She loves doppelgänger. I ignore her ghost then, though. I’m glad he can’t see my mom’s ghost in our apartment, sometimes.

Her death happened exactly as written in 1989. It took me until 1996 to write those opening lines. It took me until 2023 to finish the poem. It was the most difficult poem I ever wrote. It fought me. I enjoy her haunting me.

My Mother and Someone Not My Dad in Greece, the late 1960’s.

The Body As Haunted

Tonight, I am in the haunted house.

Like Ginsberg, I say the Kaddish for my mother,

singing the Hebrew mourners prayer in her same hoarse alto,

with her brown eyes, with her curls and her complexion.

I light the Yahrzeit candle I bought in the

kosher section of the Winn-Dixie

that only stretches my arms width-

She died on an October Friday the 13th.

This is an October Friday the 13th.

Tonight, I am a haunted house

I stayed with her corpse while the stepbastard got the paramedics.

Begging "Mommy don't leave me, I still need you, Don't leave me."

I hadn't called her mommy in years.

Suddenly I was younger when pop pop, daddy, and mom mom died.

I was suddenly a child, that loving daughter, that good little girl.

all rebelliousness gone,

no more breaking free-

that disease of all 17-year-olds.

Tonight, I am haunted.

I closed her eyes but they popped open and they were my eyes.

They wouldn't stay closed. I didn't have 2 coins to pay her fare.

I sat numb in the hospital while they tagged and wrote her up.

The sun rose. My cousin took me to Denny's.

"Don't leave me, I still need you, don't leave me".

I still say that. Tonight is her anniversary.

Aunt Nettie’s ghost, nor hers, has a rocking chair here.

My family always had ghosts and welcomed them.

Come, haunt me.

Let them find me, I say.

This cheap little candle lights her way to torture me.

Candles light the way home of all my lost loved ones.

A parade of ghosts comes tonight and they do not scare me.

Daddy, we can play together with Greg’s matchbox cars.

Mom Mom, I need your recipe for Jewish Apple Cake

Pop Pop, let’s paint a watercolor of my balcony view.

Aunt Nettie, I need your expertise on red lingerie.

24 hours of Remembrance.

34 years of a life after.

You’ve all haunted me all my life.

I am now older than both my parents ever were. Mommy,

No— Lois, I loved you but you were no god to whom my life should be a shrine, though I have your voice, intellect, gestures, and body.

I am so much more than just your daughter, a Xerox of you.

Let this ink bleed and stain these fingers-

I have been released!