A Lament in Four Rooms
Every house has its ghosts. Some learn our names.
Introduction
Every town, every family, every mind has its hauntings. This poem began as a ghost story, but it slowly turned inward. The “witch” became less a figure from folklore and more a voice that rises from the places we try not to look - guilt, grief, the persistence of what we thought we’d outgrown.
I.
It was not storm, nor snow, nor flame -
but silence - that first announced her.
A silence too thick for the hour,
too heavy for walls to hold.
It pressed like a damp cloth to the face,
it bent the air inside my lungs.
And in it ... she arrived.
I was eight - or nearly -
when she passed through Lincoln Street,
where my house sat crooked under a sky
one shade too low.
Elmira breathed mildew;
the radiators coughed in their sleep.
She wore no face I could name -
only folds of cloth,
stained the color of rotting plum.
Her hair moved like kelp through gravewater.
She left behind the scent of burnt wood,
wet wool, and fruit gone to pulp.
I told no one.
But the milk soured in its jar.
The attic door unlatched itself.
The dog howled at the mirror.
And under the floorboards -
something slower than footsteps.
Something that chewed.
II.
Time fled, as it does
when children try to outgrow their shadows.
I buried her - or thought I did.
Years later I moved south,
to streets of brittle grass,
where the air smelled more of dust than ash.
The house was modern, square,
its locks untroubled.
But dread has long legs.
And she ... longer.
At first, only the smallest intrusions:
the whisper of moth wings in a room with no moths,
a drip of water when every pipe was dry,
that iron taste that settled behind the tongue.
Then came the dreams -
a mouth beneath the floor,
a second heartbeat in the walls,
my own hands moving while I slept.
And soon she stood again
beneath the dead birch tree,
tilting her head toward my window.
Not knocking.
Never knocking.
Just waiting.
III.
I sealed the doors.
Salted the thresholds.
Lit candles until the air soured from wax.
But it is not enough.
She does not come from outside.
She comes from beneath -
from beneath memory,
beneath guilt,
from the crawlspace of language
where fear begins.
She is not the witch of storybooks -
not hags or brooms or boiling pots.
She is older.
She is hunger in the walls,
grief with fingers,
time’s black mold.
I smell her in my clothes.
I hear her dragging nails beneath the tiles.
And when I sleep -
I do not sleep.
I listen.
Last night, I found footprints in soot by the furnace -
bare, cracked,
black pressed deep in the heels.
And beside them -
my own.
IV.
I do not open the curtains now.
I do not answer the phone.
My voice has thickened;
it echoes in ways I can’t predict.
She has folded herself
between my ribs.
I feel her blink inside me.
My teeth ache.
There is something beneath my tongue -
a word I do not remember learning,
but dream of saying aloud.
And now ...
she does not knock.
She seeps.
Through floorboards.
Through vents.
Through thought.
Like ink through wet paper.
She sits behind my eyes.
She breathes through my breath.
She has become the hunger between meals,
the blackness between blinking lights.
And when I open my mouth -
the voice that answers...
is ours.
GBS
2000
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