Poem 182 ± December 3, 2015

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 CallihanNicole 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.