Lorelei Bacht

Gone Spectral

I scrutinize your mother’s face: if
you had passed, the wrinkles behind
her glasses would droop – do they?

Rumination does not serve to restore.
As with all medical advice, I register
yet continue, yet continue.

The ghost in ghosting may be you
or me – our respective existences
increasingly uncertain, a translucency.

No, but really, says the psychiatrist. On
paper, the trajectory is clean, is feasible –
his legal pad. I drowns between the lines,

first, middle and last names as hook,
line and sinker. I propose scenarios:
she’s on an MFA, incognito; reconstructive

surgery; forged passports; a new career
under her brother’s wing; underground in
Berlin. But let’s face it: there is no way

back in. Everyone has their bit to say
about ships sailed, skies already fallen.
Meanwhile, I envy my old self, the pink

peony cocktail dress that once embraced –

---

Iodine

Back from doctors, from scintillating
scans, you curled your aches within my
body of waiting, of wondering how bad,

and breathed – your stoppable, somehow
salvaged clockwork still lifting cracked
rib after rib, rack of weak winter suns.

I put a hand on your thick black-and-blues,
monitored for fevers – attempted to. You,

break of dawn made skin – four years in

and I still marvel that you happened,
small stubborn fists balled up, screeching
for milk, avocado, crackers – nothing

before you that did not conduct to you.

Your cherry cheeks now bruised, stitched
thirty-five times by patient hooks gloved

white, glowing their disinfected silver
salvation: one surgeon clasps, one nurse
cuts off, one soothesays in her foreign

tongue, one sits on your knees while you
scream like kitten skin unpeeled, like you
four years ago, like you newborn – I did

not know that you had kept that scream.

I type texts to whoever wishes to worry –
there are many – then drop my phone

and watch you sigh, watch you wince your
courageous small. Dawn ribbons while
I attempt to sing you into please, please,

carry on breathing.

---

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Lorelei Bacht’s recent work has appeared and/or is forthcoming in Mercurius, Anti-Heroin Chic, Menacing Hedge, Beir Bua, Sinking City, Barrelhouse, SWWIM, The Inflectionist Review, After the Pause, and elsewhere. She is also on Instagram: @lorelei.bacht.writer and on Twitter: @bachtlorelei