Ghost Town

The lifeless part of me 
pulls a chair next to the dead
buried in you, asks How 
you been? which means 
Are you broken 
like the rest? We 
order drinks with lime 
to feel alive, salt 
over shoulders, superstition 
another bad habit 
like aspartame or grudges. 
You throw sugared peanuts 
down your throat to glint 
on the floor and I envy 
your transparency, erasure 
a skill I never mastered. 
The jukebox plays a song 
from some time dull 
enough to be fashionable 
now that we are ghosts 
in a town occupied 
by its own extinction. 
I liked spirits as a child, 
the forever of it all, haunting 
a feel-good hurt, numb, 
thrum like how Casper 
was a boy that looked 
like a girl kissing a girl 
at a boring party 
like this one, everyone 
in costume and dancing 
badly, and after they floated 
he ghosted and isn’t that
the appeal?— 
that I’m dead, and you, 
that we understand 
the effort it takes to spin 
these stools, these olives 
in our briny glasses, 
to ask How did you die
and when and do you miss 
breathing and swings, 
your reflection staring 
back at you? At the end 
I will hover through you 
as if to say you are something 
and you will let me go 
first through the wall 
by the door, lingering 
in the rain, our lonely 
lit up by the traffic 
lights, making us feel 
as if we are almost alive.

---

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and three poetry chapbooks. Her work has been listed as notable several times in Best American Essays, and her poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including Bellingham Review, Brevity, Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, Electric Literature, LitHub, The Poetry Foundation, The Rumpus, Southeast Review, and others. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery.