self-portrait as cape cod ghost
i am very practiced in visitation, in which i am the one visiting; i pass a sign for ghost tours, which don’t interest me—what is a ghost tour to the already ethereal?
white tourists refuse to move as to share the sidewalk and i specify white because all of them are
i know i’m a tourist here, too, more or less, but ghosts, permeable as we may be, know how to watch where we’re going, or at least put in the effort
down the one main street i make my way through and past bodies, flinch at doors dropped in front of me
no one here summoned me and yet here i am to wander the streets alone, to walk a gay haven lined with pride flags but no welcome for the body of a queer black boy
a black ghost—often invisible, often a cause of fear
most of my metaphors are a form of coping
most of my coping is a form of magic—no one offers to be my assistant, everyone mistakes the waving black curtain for a trick of the light, I transmute my trauma into a scroll and drop it in a bottle in the Atlantic
the bottle is opaque but the scroll translucent
the bottle washes all the way home and waits in my own mailbox for me to return
i’m the most boring kind of ghost—can’t walk through walls, can’t fly, can’t cheat death but instead death cheats me and calls it a history lesson
there are only two people of color at the concert and the metaphor writes itself because we sit all the way in the back before realizing we’re alone
the guitarist plays the guitar like a violin and uses a loop petal
i get lost on the way back but only a little, find a monument to orient me
the bnb room is upstairs, small but there are two black people in it, neither family nor lovers, and i’m no good with numbers but i know at least when i’m not impossibly outnumbered and lonely
in some towns, they’re coating the streets white so they don’t absorb the sun’s heat, reducing temperatures—better for the environment; when I leave this town it will be easier for it to achieve homeostasis
the stairs are too steep—
i walk up to the top room—
bodies down the streets
s(p)lit
a brief moment:
wished to open eyes wide
until the lids
bent back
all the way
over the skull
the whole body even
turned me all inside open
but have you seen
the news
my growing sores
i hear they opened
a whole-ass rift
in the earth’s ozone
pity it is not the crust
for us to swan dive into
or jackknife
how does such a crevice
whistle how do i skin
watch spill dilate
my fingers cracking
my mother sculpted me
from black porcelain left the eyes
with exaggerated pupils
i communed with teacups
and toilets i chipped
a bit with each step
i’ve used an awful lot of glue
Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit. His poetry and fiction have been given homes by Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Waxwing, and Iowa Review, among others. He teaches writing and literature at University of Michigan, where he earned his MFA in poetry.