Leave the haunted house.
I won’t stop you.
But these ghosts will follow
you out onto the sidewalk,
and into school buses.
You’ll timidly wait for stop lights
to turn green, yellow, red.
You’ll ration out your self-esteem
with glances at the joggers on the crosswalk.
Look both ways when you cross
the street, please.
Stone house. Train tracks behind the gas station
whirl at night, plastic bags with liquor bottles shiver
at forty three degrees fahrenheit. Drug charges
in every house on the street.
Crooked lamp posts and telephone lines
neatly placed on each side of the yellow concrete.
Stone house. I can see my breath, sitting on a yellow couch,
and blowing smoke into and out of the stone chimney.
The mirror nailed into the wall above the fireplace
has my face in it. Blue eyes and little yellow beads for pupils.
Spirits and misty specks of dust are inexplicably knocking over
urns and ash trays on the dining room table. Ceiling fans
are shaking and the dust in rotten cupboards is launched into
the air with green and red and yellow spices, flavoring
the oxygen; breathing in and out, I feel blue like this, I don’t
know what it is. There were times I used to hide my feelings.
There were times when I was in a flying saucer,
handcuffed in an anatomical theater, black bands on my wrists,
feathers on my fingers and on my toes; feathers growing
on my pale cheeks and on my legs and on my head too.
But lately I don’t know what it is about these houses I’ve
been walking into. I ravage pill drawers and medicine
cabinets. I throw fits over coffee cups and cigarettes. I don’t feel quite at home in that cabinet apartment.
The wallpaper is flaking on me, peeling yellow and
gray, maybe I make places that I stay
yellow with age.
In the mud outside the house, fallen over and blacked out.
White shoes stained red with fruit punch vomit.
I woke up the next day with a headache.
I’m sorry I vomited on your lawn, old man.
I walked down the sidewalk, methodically
stepping on each crack. Your foot kind of
caves into the valleys in the gray concrete.
Rain pouring into storm drains,
pigeons and cardinals dangling from
telephone lines. The rain stopped right then.
You said these ghosts would follow me out
onto the sidewalk. I sat on the curb and watched
the stop light turn green, yellow, and red.
Ethan Plate is a sophomore at Lindenwood studying Creative Writing and Philosophy/Religion. He works as a tutor in the writing center, and when he gets some free time, he likes to spend it listening to and playing music and writing poetry. Ethan has liked poetry since his childhood and has been writing it devotedly for the past few years. The poetry he writes is usually religious-themed with a lot of apocalyptic imagery. He has been previously published at Arrow Rock.
Arrow Rock Literary Journal 