Breakfast for Ghosts
Whatever I came here for
I leave without–
my old skin
sloughed off in the ashing,
my old face traced
onto the back of another memory.
I wear
the Strawberry Shortcake swimsuit
bare feet
the heart wound up
red and tight as a baby’s fist.
My hands hold the garden hose
that will fill the pool
and kill the frog
I meant to mother.
Were the swamp candles lit?
No one could remember.
But the frog
floated there
foggy-eyed
like some knotty whisper.
The water scalding
as a bowl
of shattered glass.
On Watching Poltergeist with My Son
Maybe it’s the fact that Poltergeist will be the first horror film of his life.
Maybe it’s the boy in the movie—
Robbie—so close
in age to the 11 years of my boy
1 one-thousand, 2 one-thousand, 3–
a boy counting on this storm to end
the way his father told him it would.
Or maybe it’s my boy
with only his eyes peeking out
from the old blanket,
but something inside me
wishes we’d watched
this movie together years ago.
Even as the dead tree outside Robbie’s window
comes to life and swallows him whole
and his little sister, Carol Ann, stares
into the dazzling light of her bedroom closet,
I imagine myself in the swirl of that space
moving backward into a brilliant chaos reserved only
for the young,
where I wait on the lawn with my father
who hurls an overripe plum inside an old sock
deep into a dusky sky
The evening is unspooling–
the bats scattering—
me believing that my father
could make anything happen
in the bruised twilight of an August sky.
It was 1983–years before mental illness cast his sanity
far from where any of us could possibly reach.
Years before I grew and grew
into a suicidal teenager,
into a woman who realized life is everything,
into a mother who promised her boy
the blood coating Carol Ann and her mother
was only strawberry jelly after all.
Just that.
Like a gathering of bats,
an explosion of old plums.
Does Carol Ann die? he wonders.
He doesn’t ask, but I imagine
that he wants to ask it.
That I wanted to ask it in 1983 when Poltergeist hit HBO
and I watched it for the first time,
and then watched it again and again, over and over.
I was barely five, transfixed by Carol Ann and her mother
dropped through the ceiling and out
of some other world, covered in strawberry jelly.
Oh, yes, my mother told me that, too.
I cut Carol Ann’s picture out of the TV Guide,
put it in my wallet as if it were a photograph.
To me, she was that beautiful.
All white-blonde hair and blissful unawareness,
the strange angle of her smile, captivating
both the dead and the living.
I wanted her family
who communicated without the trouble
of too many verbs.
Closet light! Closet light!
Words dumped in a cigar box
lost in the feathers of a dead canary.
“Does Carol Ann die in the sequel?” he asks
as we walk upstairs to our beds.
“No, but she dies in real life,” I say.
I have to say
because she does.
“But she’s just a little kid?” His voice breaks between us.
I say Uh huh, carelessly like Diane Freeling does
when Carol Ann asks her if she sees the TV people,
this shrug of acknowledgement, explanation enough
for the unpredictability of life.
Uh huh–
(Sometimes our lives devolve into piles of shit, my boy,
unfinished swimming pools sloshing with mud and bone,
the strangled actress lying in grass,
the girl with nothing but a sock full of fruit
and the whole fucking sky before her.)
I want Uh huh to mean everything.
Heather O’Rourke wouldn’t live
to become a teenager
while I grew up
and scared my son with a truth
I’d squirreled away for every day of his life.
And now, this very night, I lay it out: The Truth.
It’s so important, I decide to capitalize it.
And I point it out:
here and here and here.
Allyson Wuerth is a writer and high school English teacher. She has published poetry in The Maine Review, Pine Row Press, Libre, Here: A Poetry Journal, Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, The Haiku Shack, Marrow Magazine, and several other literary journals. She has work forthcoming in Belladonna’s Garden Literary Magazine. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh.
The Marbled Sigh 