forever which means we are the ghosts
I always knew we were.
What haunts me is that I am certain
that everything that has ever happened
that everything that will ever happen
is happening right now.

When I order a drink, I am being named.
When you slip me your number, I am carrying your ashes
in my purse through the streets of Rome.
To preserve the body of an animal you love
first strip its skin and inject it with poison.
Reassembled, it loves you back, marble-eyed, without end.

Tonight Van Morrison plays on the jukebox
we knock against the tables into the mystic
and it comforts me that our child already exists or already doesn’t.
She is in my arms, she is a phantom, she is named Rosalie
after my great-grandmother who in this moment
is turning sixteen on the prairie under an opening

sky. All my life it has been the same time of day
this is a basement bar, anyway
lit only by sconces, beetles pinned to the wall
all our friends have gathered beneath the earth.
You just arrived
I have never been here before.

Photo by Milo Bauman on Unsplash