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Issue 3.1

Winter 2023

Rachel Moritz

Reflection

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to go on a writing retreat at a site without cell phone access. Nevertheless, a text arrived one night from a number I didn't recognize, and the voice felt otherworldly, as if from a dream. This poem—part of a longer series of hauntings—was 
the result.

Ghost Poem (Cabin)

 

where once I received a text 
from shore—screen 
lit with black
and didn’t recognize 
the number 
and then our sequence dropped off
and water outside 
the cabin screen lapped
quietly onto our present
so I woke up hurried 
in thought
I woke up shingled by the roof 
inside my tongue
the quilt of cloud and brushed 
thereafter, haunting
thereafter, arriving without 
naming me as theirs, a swell 
in the vertical climb 
a tenor of torn rock
and green as it grew fluent
as I grew angry at whomever
had not done more,
at my dead and not myself
and it was daughter-like, 
helpless, the worst of what 
I got taught—this 
wanting to be guided by
their absence

Rachel Moritz is the author of Sweet Velocity (Lost Roads Press, 2017), Borrowed Wave (Kore Press, 2015), and five poetry chapbooks. She lives in Minneapolis with her partner and son.

Rachel's Book Recommendations

Dauerwunder: A Brief Record of Facts, Carolina Ebeid

Team Photograph, Lauren Haldeman

In A Few Minutes Before Later, Brenda Hillman

Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, John Murillo

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