alise versella

I Think the Dead are Watching Me

The glassy-eyed doe hangs in the limbo of my living room.

She hangs next to a wall of mirrors.

In the mirrors I watch myself.

She tells me, “It begins with the body.

We are haunted by bones—their aching.”

The skulls in my house are tattooed

with ink and pen and studded with garnet.

There are

stag horns and foxtails,

deer jaws.

I clench my jaw so hard at night I feel like my teeth are decomposing.

We save eggshells for composting.

“Aren’t we all made for the compost? Dear Whitman, bless this compost.”

The doe wants to unhook her mouth, so I ask her, “Would you tell me something soothing?”

She says, “Empty sockets are still seeing—a third eye type of knowledge.”

I say, “But I keep painting animals, my tiny little totems

and the eyes have no life to them

I cannot catch the glint.”

Every morning I walk down the hall and the mirrored wall

reflects me and the doe.

“Do you still dream of pine-needled floors?” I ask her

as I stare at the glitter in the popcorn ceiling

and rub my eyes of sleep grit stars.

I keep waiting for the doe eyelid (held perpetually open) to close,

for my paintings to blink,

for some ghost

to come awake

and tell me they’re alive in a better place.

A Woman Holds a Vacancy

I am not my mother’s firstborn.

An argument let

the bones of that skeleton
tumble out of its closet,

my mother’s wound

a wounded baby bird

starving in the nest.

She is not the only one

to hold her secret in her chest.

My mother’s past life

is the branch split by the lightning strike.

Such thin skin on the newborn bird

I notice as it lies crushed in the dirt.

My mother’s remaining children and her ghosts haunting the room.

The unspoken hollows in the family tree.

My grandmother’s wounded womb

a hysterectomy,

a piece of her removed.

A woman would

carve out her organs until emptied

to feel forgiven, the heavy
stones of the dead son she buries.

No photography

to immortalize a memory.

A mother’s remaining children and the ghosts haunting the room.

Mother, every year you swallow the moon

and a new crater is carved out of you.

I know of the craters formed

in women who yearn.

My aunt who wished her womb could do more

was told by the doctors a pregnancy

would cause more harm

to her already ravished insides.

A woman’s only child and the ghosts haunting the room.

Mother, you are planet and gravitational pull.

A daughter is the satellite that orbits you.

Do not think her devoid of light

if her galaxy never breeds stars.

Somehow I decided

my belly would never be full.

A deflated uterine balloon.

A vacancy, but no one could rent the room.

I am not incomplete

if you tie up the tributaries

that run through me.

I will have no firstborn.

There will be nothing to bury or mourn.

I will overflow in other ways.

A woman remains, exorcising the ghosts from the room.