BENJAMIN GOLDBERG
Psalm for a Great Lake Ghosts of nowhere else never sang in waves. Nor did we palm them like Petosky stones we skipped. Or, fake-sinking, tangle in them. No vende!as against flesh grew tactile or lurked—scaled like the pike we imagined aimed at our toes, angry as the seaweed that might’ve wrangled us by our ankles into undertows. A Petosky stone, you told me, is a fossil. A fossil, no one said, is a grave whose epitaph is a skeleton. We plunged through white caps past where freshwater shelves darkened and turned us into selves. But here I am again speaking about ghosts as if we’d known them.
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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY