His ghost comes, nestled in my ear, coiled, the wintered husk of a spent roly-poly. I’ve instructed him to visit only when no one else is around. Otherwise, I startle from the sudden static. But this time—with someone else in the room!—his familiar tenor draws close, pitches low, curls into my tympani not unlike a fiddle-head fern, spoons there like a mother tucking around a sleeping child. Then, a thrum: I’m safe, two necessary words that cross the cosmos, tinny from the passage, as though squeezed through a rusted trumpet. What we do to stay together.
January 31, 2023 [Issue 41]
Grey Sparrow Journal 