It is, I suppose, always about ghosts,
in one way or three ways;
always about the trail of distant crumbs
that hansel and gretel themselves through
your neuronal passageways;
the images that hunt themselves down
and chalk themselves onto some
whiteboard in the bookshelves of the brain /
the criss-crossed angles of diligent
dreams that will not rattle themselves
from your storerooms; the hungry mess
that does not clean itself or wipe down
sparkling and reflective,
but tracks mud through all the new structures;
the soft plywood sunroom you
are trying to build in your grey matter
filled, all too quickly,
with tattered curtains blowing in the
mid-june golden wind;
a little trace of everything
around the outline of anything /
It’s always the first drawing
of every first draft you ever
struggled your way through;
it’s always inside the pen, inside the shape,
inside the riddle, the question,
the words themselves
you learned, relearned,
as a child seeing golden wind
through the curtains
for the first time ;
Or is the first time , always ever
tinged, with every other
somewhere prayer
singing through the every wind;
tapping your ears on the shoulder
whispering things you cannot
make out
Lauren Suchenski has a difficult relationship with punctuation. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and four times for The Best of the Net. Her full-length collection “All You Can Measure” (2022) as well as a chapbook “Full of Ears and Eyes Am I” (2017) is available from Finishing Line Press. Another chapbook “All Atmosphere” is also available from Selcouth Station (2022). More of her writing can be found on Instagram @lauren_suchenski or on Twitter @laurensuchenski.