if you have ghosts (you have everything)
i never met my grandfather till today—
he dies in 1975
and today he was born
at the bottom of a drawer in the kitchen,
his coffin and crib:
he is swaddled in moth-eaten dish towels
by a nameless undertaker
or perhaps the autophagic author himself
his crib and coffin:
he was buried a lifetime,
deaf to my own cacophonous et cetera
amidst cardboard boxes
he arises, stretches
and sits on our couch, transparent and whispering
his earliest recollections in ink from distant trenches:
he eats sliced-up milky way bars,
listens to little orphan annie and the manhattan rainstorms
as they flood his empty pillowcase;
my earliest recollection is a blank notebook,
never happened,
didn’t fall from the sky till three-quarters of a century later,
in drops of impossible invisible ink
in 1934 i smell decades-old storms,
tobacco smoked by children
and today he tastes dough
from hands of women he could have loved
together we break toys, apologize to our ghosts
listen to drops on macadam phantoms.
we think tonight was cloudy.
we left identical sleigh tracks in identical snow
laughed identical laughs whose echoes and imprints
are separated only by city and by many, many newspapers.
we remembered the same sun,
the same rain and lightning
and we both wrote that we might be heard over the century’s thunder
but stopped, hid, tired, retired—
shaking hands
halfway to tomorrow,
never touching—
two strange strangers
left sleepless and motionless in the same notebooks,
the same house:
in the same cradles and the same coffins.
Jenna Coburn is a senior psychology major and English minor at SUNY Geneseo. She is from the Hudson Valley where she enjoys caring for her cacti, doodling, writing poems, and annoying her family via the guitar. This is her first published work.