The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Beautiful Outlaw by Jennifer Perrine

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DEAR GHOST,

Here I am, at the festival, reading
poems about you. No, that’s not true.

I’m reading poems about those last days
when you were on the cusp of ghosthood

and I did not believe it, could not yet
perceive it. I tell the tales of how

you grew into my phantom companion,
and the audience delivers me

sagging bouquets of pity. They assume
you are a metaphor, a portal

through which I release my grief. They cannot
see how even now, you’re perusing

the book fair behind them, trying to leaf
through pages and failing. They cannot

know how you hardly ever leave my side
even when I am wicked and cry

for you to go or else to stop hiding
from passersby who look away, shake




their heads when I speak to you. You let them
pass their unfamiliar limbs right through

your once-skin. I am jealous of such touch,
your intimacy with each person

who sits beside me on the bus, who leans
close in the grocery aisle, reaching

into your skull for salt or cereal.
When I tell my therapist of this

envy, he asks, do you think you’re lonely?
What he means is, I think you’re lonely.

I remember lonely: nights when you still
had a body, began folding it

into the opposite end of the couch
from me, resting it there when I went

to our bed. I remember desolate:
the ruins of your mouth when you said,

poetry just isn’t my thing, despite
years when you’d sing my name when you came

across it in a table of contents,
declaim each verse to our throng of dogs.




Now, journals slouch in heaps, like the dishes
rank in the sink, like your possessions

I have placed on a chair with the intent
of donation. I sometimes find you

perched there, as if you do not care to part
with your threadbare quilt, your shirt I wore

and did not wash until it lost your scent.
My therapist asks, when will you let

yourself really feel this death? I feel less
sure of what you are thinking these days,

as I read lines about you to full rooms
in which you’re the only soul I know.

It’s been a year, and I haven’t outgrown
these incantations. If I can’t stop

these summonings, all I ask is for you
to behave for once like a proper

poltergeist, to flicker the lights, to fling
some blunt cutlery or slam a door

with the force of your presence. All I ask
is that you make some mischief, menace

me just enough so that I recall you
were not always this kind, as placid

as you appear now, slant of light falling
through your sheer shoulder. All I ask is

that you find the chain that binds me to you
and if you cannot break it, rattle

that shackle, smack it against the windows
until they shatter, let your rumble

and clatter loose, let your spirit smolder
with effort until the whole living

world witnesses these marks you leave, until
I am not your only beholder.

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