Paige Caine is an undergraduate rising senior studying creative writing and biology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. Her poetry has also been published or is forthcoming in Star*Line, ANGLES, The Merrimack Review, Adanna, and The Ekphrastic Review. HauntedI choke out your memory with smoke, drown you in liquor but you’re there each morning when I wake. You’re there at 3am when my sheets tangle and my sweat is cold. You aren’t you in these moments; you kiss me sweetly, soft, like I am the apparition who might dissolve at too hard a touch. You aren’t you in these moments; you stay. These are the only moments I feel like me. My Sisters and MeWe were raised like dandelions in the brightest sunshine; I believe my mother would warp it warmer for us if she could, if only she had a big enough magnifying glass, bending nature to her indomitable will just to see the light on our faces. Still we scattered as we grew, dandelion seeds in the wind, fleeing for Pennsylvania, for Georgia, for the cold mountains of Alaska where the night lasts months. Away. Only from here do I see it wasn’t her; all along there was something else fermented in the soil. Plea to the ghost in my basement You start your car with a kazoo, kiss it, strange shriek over muffled breath, two beeps and the keys click. Please pass for me every time, please drive past your drowned dreams — they won’t help you now — and see us, on those days those slippery days when the car starts, your jokes are funny, comments smart. You know you drown him too, so please see us, this time. Please stay. Your FaithSorry for every night I forgot
to pray like you taught me, hands pressed together, fingertips pointing toward heaven. Sorry my soul is stained as your glass images but lets through no light to be distorted as the word of God across two thousand years. I wish I could believe like you taught me to in all the moments between prayers— flossing popcorn from my teeth, zipping up my boots— but most nights I can’t believe even when I need to most. Don’t waste any time behind those pearly gates searching for me like I am lost in the grocery store. You won’t find me this time. Forgive me, I know you meant to save me.
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