Craving touch, I watch people hunt ghosts. Allow me to make a tapestry
where I am the hazel tree. The stag possessed— buried beneath me. I admit I am
of a long-evolved line of moths, touching my body through glass, the paper of my spine
arched, light. When I’m dead I’ll be fluent in frequency. Everything will become
architecture. Walls and thresholds gentle, deep— I won’t know which is skin,
tenor or bone. I lived in a house barely haunted. A spirit who wandered the yard
but never went inside. Barren with desert, body a milky scorpion husk under the sun,
moving from one end of the weary blue day up to its dusked edge. I was waiting for permission,
to palm and pool and appear suddenly myself again. Monsoonal toads hit doors
like hail. The hummingbirds stunned still. We used blacklight, counted night
crawlers, their skeletons constellating mineral into cosmos. I don’t care at all—
how we spoke to each other then. Printing fingers, stubbled leg hair manifests, knees
wrapped, hip bone cradled— I’ll walk out into the night vision lens as air. The mumbled
ultraviolet: try to remember our form— lip fuzzing air against tips of ears. The hollow beneath neck.
Stereoscope: Disembodied Sonnet
Lisa Compo is an MFA candidate at UNC - Greensboro. She has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Rhino, Puerto del Sol, Cimarron Review, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere.