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.