Issue 2.3
Fall 2022
Rachel Moritz
Reflection
Reading Victoria Chang’s Dear, Memory, and writing toward the blurry faces of my personal ghosts, I’ve been thinking about haunting as various notes of presence and absence. Poetry helps measure the gaps between these poles.
Ghost Poem (Cardinal)
Each of us some silo of extraction
Bound to a flawed face alive & loving us
Each perch in a neighbor’s oak
And saying the dead clamor
While we finish our somatic work
Each pulse in the planet's weather
Each burning down our salt hearts
But not this brute technology
Making particles of thought
Each square plot becoming more and more ours
Each scuff of water on shingles
And stucco of an absent neighbor
Each ancestor, whomever, someone we can’t
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
Dear, Memory, Victoria Chang
Shirt in Heaven, Jean Valentine
Free Clean Fill Dirt, Caryl Pagel
DMZ Colony, Don Mee Choi
Ancestor Trouble, Maud Newton