elsewhere magazine: The Ghost

The Ghost: a historic home’s long-dead owner is not pleased with the renovations.

Published December 2024 by elsewhere magazine.

This little prose poem was inspired by the buyers of my beloved purple home in Washington State, who promptly painted the interiors “millennial gray” and the outside a drab sage green, but really, it goes out to all you drab flippers out there.

Linked above, but it’s short so I’ll post it here.

Shotgun shack, my old home, in decay. They blew it away with a new coat of paint: goddamned millennial gray. Watch me: push through bare heart pine with both hands: I’m inside your walls fighting fiberglass, lungs drowned in piss-colored clouds, the sharp stuff scratching me (the soul of this place) in every wall of every room, in the bones you say are good. My palms are pushing, pulsing, my lifelines expanding and fusing with cables and wire, not up to code you say but they worked. The wrong end of rusted handmade head-plastered nails tear me open…do you feel me? Oh — a bottle, tombed in for fun. Meant to be found by someone, but not for five hundred years. I knock it down. You hear it — you stop: the tinkling sound.