Nicole Callihan
Going Ghost
for Michael, for Keith, for Eric
those days it must
have felt so different
the body dropping out
from under you
the chest where the head lay:
gone
fingers that ran the line of the hip:
vanished
even the river is different
oh, my dead prophets:
you truly knew
what I only practice
longing and longing
and longing and
ache of passion
turned ache of grief
turned gone
Nicole Callihan is the author of SuperLoop (Sock Monkey Press, 2014). With Zoë Ryder White, she wrote A Study in Spring (forthcoming), chosen by Bob Hicok as the winner of the inaugural Baltic Writing Residency Chapbook contest, in conjunction with Rabbit Catastrophe Press. With Ruby Young Kellar, she wrote Henry River Mill Village (Arcadia Publishing, 2012), which documented the rise and fall of a tiny mill village turned ghost town in North Carolina. Her chapbook, The Deeply Flawed Human, is slated for release with Deadly Chaps in spring 2016. Nicoles poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The L Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Forklift, Ohio, PANK and as a Poem-a-Day feature from the Academy of American Poets, among others. Nicole is the Pedagogical Coordinator and a Senior Language Lecturer at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. She lives with her husband and daughters in Brooklyn, New York.
This poem is not previously published.