Ghosts in the Graveyard

by Carmen R. Gillespie

This visit back home
my grandmother’s house
is the wrong color, reddish brown flaking
revealing the correct aqua green
underneath.

Since her funeral,
I have not walked to her house
just across from the church.

The intersection, High and Main,
points in every direction toward
boarded-up stretches of street,
injured like fingers after fire,
familiarly foreign,
and irreparably charred.

Remains of cast iron fence,
former fort and homebase for Ghosts in the Graveyard,
reign as rusted sentry in the grassless yard.

At the door, her eyes are
exposed earth and exhalation.
“This used to be my . . .”
“Que?”

My studied “holas y mi llamo es” drift
unsaid, pass into spaces I cannot, past
her white sheets blowing gently, taped
to our ornate molding, framed like
canvases—clean and blank.