Flicker

by Sarah Koenig

 

If ghosts were fertile, they wouldn’t look for the switch that turns on the flashlight. They
wouldn’t seek mirrors where they touch their own faces, where a sheet becomes a nightgown,
and vice versa. It is freedom they seek when they flicker those lights. Feeling my way along the
baseboards, I touch their light limbs. I squirrel them away to my bedside table. See? Already
they become more solid, filling out the steam that rises from my cup.

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SARAH KOENIG lives in Seattle, WA. Her poetry has appeared in Gravel, DIAGRAM, Barrow Street, and Forklift, Ohio, among other journals. It has also appeared on King County transit as part of the Poetry on Buses project and in Washington 129, an anthology of Washington State poets.