Good morning, ghosts

I.

When steam sprays my bathroom mirror matte grey,

you can read the faint

fingerscribbled notes left behind 

by the apartment’s previous dwellers:

Matt  loves  Laura

Steph is a bad bitch

                                    -xoxo, Kate

At room temp,

the surface spots with impact zones

of harsh particles, sneezes, tooth paste, popped pimples, 

all manners of gunk

never fully cleansed or erased

II.

On the slowest of mornings,

when I feel as though 

I’ve lost a syllable of my name 

to the space 

between dreams, 

or when yellow morning light 

silvers through my blinds, cuts my bedroom’s dimensions 

into a graph of:

the dustiest books

the deadest clothes

the moldiest mugs

Often,

the absence of an axis 

of why and where and who 

erects every hair of my arms 

to perfect quivering stillness 

my shavings lie defeated and dismembered 

in the bowl of the sink 

like the legs of crickets

I want to return to bed

slip between sheets 

like orange peels between fingers,

and find that missing syllable

III.

Instead,

I twist the shower to the hotness useful for

softening broccoli

and stand staring dumbly

trying to figure out by the

architecture of his fingerwriting

if he really loved her.

About the Author

Taylor Schmid is from Lititz, Pennsylvania. He will graduate from Arcadia University in May with a degree in English & Creative Writing.  The morning following graduation, Taylor will fly to Chile and tour the Atacama Desert for one final hoorah before returning to PA and enrolling in adulthood. Taylor enjoys writing poetry and short fiction.  He is also the 2016 recipient of the Arcadia University Creative Writing Award.