Tonight Your Ghost

Emily Kingery

                            Tonight your ghost will ask my ghost

                            Who put these bodies between us?

                            --Metric, “Calculation Theme”

We enter the cemetery to touch

the illegible names on stones, 

quiet and damp to our skin 

as cellars, even now, when 

the brittle August grass 

breaks under us like cereal. 

Oak branches snap as squirrels 

leap in fright, in play; teenagers

swerve their parents’ cars to the edges

where there are no plots. 

We guess they stash drugs in the glove boxes, 

undress each other, and we are right

without knowing if we are. 

Decades have slipped from our lives 

since we did the same, though it’s wrong

to say we are in mourning, even if

we are. I have imagined the two

of your exes who died by suicide 

are the air wicking away our sweat, 

are the birds the size of gargoyles 

calling out for each other in the 

voices of cats. That says something

about us, you say, but you don’t say

what I want. When high beams swoop 

our path, they light animals preying 

on each other. We feel afraid

of ourselves. We are never so ready

to run or to maul a pitiful body down 

to bone, never ready. I know

what I want. I want what animals want 

when they are threatened, when the light 

has been dissolved. I am willing your mouth

to say, We will, to complete the sentence 

with flesh, with impulse, with car windows 

clouded with breath instead of weather. 

The insects are violent in our ears. 

You say if the gates are shut when we leave, 

we will go around them, like ghosts.

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