by Rachael Ikins
I am the firing squad
shouting the ghosts in line.
They beseech me on their knees.
Here is the night you abandoned me
in a strange city,
warm lamplight
through a window
a book’s silhouette.
Here are the bruises over your scarred sternum,
a whole torso of stairs. Once I was a wife,
gunstock against my foot.
These days I am
a homesteader who tucks dreams into
pillows of compost.
Artist on the porch, plein air.
What remains of us is a scribble
beneath my right arm.
All the times you turned away,
a scattered grove of trillium.
Ten years for first bloom.
That Wednesday night when I watched you
pick at the Band-Aid on your wrist unpeels
two frogs that live in my fountain.
At night a tree-toad sings to hunting bats.
I still recall the last words we spoke.
I loose ash on the wind, fireflies,
a field of forsythia and lilac.
Now I want chocolate, melting on my tongue.
Time for soft ice cream dribbling down fingers.
Puppy licks
me, I laugh.
Phoebes nest on the drainpipe.
Their two-note song questions from the hedgerow.
Was it the tattoos,
was it the money?
Flying water, rain spouts off new maple leaves,
sudden fullness, the air, my eyes can’t hold
your bleeding arm anymore.
Where once shut a statue of a locked door,
with a boot-printed crack a ghost slips
through
and flies
away
on moth-
wings.
***
Rachael Ikins is a 2016/18 Pushcart nominee, 2018 Independent Book Award winner, 2024 winner 2nd place Northwind Writing Awards, author/artist of 13 books. Her cats remain unimpressed with this and will sit on the keyboard if she works past their mealtimes. Her work has appeared in NYC, Paris, France and Washington DC. Syracuse University grad, member Bayou City branch NLAPW, and Associate Editor of Clare Songbirds Publishing House, Auburn, NY.
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