Freddie haunts the operating room,
hunches over the surgeons as they repair body after body.
Philando haunts the interstate,
and counts the broken taillights that pass like dim shooting stars
knowing full well that no wish will save him from this.
Do ghosts like living in haunted houses,
trapped in the fossils of their own trauma?
It isn’t the presence of spirits that we find frightening,
but remembering their deaths,
a grief that we have become so good at pushing down.
But there are the days
when another name creeps its way onto the TV and the grief swells
bubbling from a wound long stitched up,
knocking from a room long left locked, and with it too, the questions come.
Which object or action will be the justification
for turning my body into smoke,
my mother into an old and shuttered house?
How can I fear the specters when they are victims themselves?
How can I hate the poltergeists when we are so similar?
The living see me and cry, “Horror!”
I cry out and all they hear is wind.
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