Holy Ghost

Ethan Muckelbauer

I have this moment where 
I’m vomiting sprints 
in a stranger’s backyard 
and with each heave I think 
it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay and  all around me the sky is yawning, 
bodies are falling, buildings are 
catching fire, this is it,  this is the air from your lungs  screaming me into the grass. 
It’s been two years, 
three years,  and I think about it every day, 
about how it must have felt 
to swan dive off the roof,
how your feet hugged the
shingles until they rubbed raw,
how in those seconds you 
could see every velocity,  you could see thousands of bodies  in wonderful angry colors, 
you could see ten hundred 
million spirits toeing against 
the gutter waiting to jump, 
you could see these fleshy pink 
arcs from sky to ground
and their collisions with crying
empty mothers kissing 
the marrow from your bones.

How beautiful 
it must be to disintegrate! 
To feel yourself pulled apart 
in every direction, coddled and
splintered against the blue black
morning of mornings!

You have hidden me, 
you have given me 
your mountain 
to carry as my own.

And then someone 
walks out 
and says are you okay 
and I say yes, yes, yes, 
I am here! I am here!
I am here!

Epitaph

Once, I ate
an entire skeleton 
for breakfast. 

It tasted  like the end 
of a bad phone call—
teeth snapping bone

just like your brother saying
there’s been an accident, 

saying maybe you should come home.

I watched limbs 
wrap around each other  with electrical wire mania. 

I watched cars 
scream their velocities  off the edge 
of a highway. 

Birds are sucked 
into propellers 
every day 

and I am not one of them. 

Does soil enjoy 
the taste of body 
or is it cough medicine, 
choked down 
morning after morning 
until everything shuts off, 

until the sun 
puts a finger to its lips 
and says Shush 
like children
in a graveyard?

Or does it pass 
unnoticed 
through the dusty maw, 
consumed  with an ignorant ferocity, 

barreling 
down its throat 
with such determination 
even plane crashes  are impressed?

Every boat 
will one day sink,  every violin 
will eventually 
catch fire; 

but that does not  make them  a waste of wood.