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