print previewback EMILY FRANKLIN
Ghost Letter
after Jean Valentine
Here is the Japanese maple gone
purple with fall and underneath it
the ghost letter I mean to show
which is somewhere been thigh
and hip bruised years ago but still
there which is not how bodies work
but how perennials persist year after
spring after summer and how each July
my thigh bruises again—either blooming
of its own accord just there and splotched
or I drop half the ping-pong table on it or bash
into a metal pull I didn’t even know about
like the first bruise at first and anyway gone and here
are bamboo shoots nosing out of the ground like
clawed creatures invincible to pulling or weather—
each new growth a reminder of hardy old ones
and that underneath lives another ghost letter only
I cannot read the writing or hear the voice
or its particular diction, the slur of memory creeping
up and out of the earth and into the mind. 
Ghost Letter
Mushrooms on the Roadside
The Persephone Period