The darkness around us is deep. –William Stafford  

Hauntings
Wavering light on shorelines, a coming murmuration. Those never arrived- at unsleeping places in dreams without beginnings. Cliffhanger endings. Bodyparts in boxes buried under layers of October leaves lost somewhere on a country road. What happens in sleep feels at first like the luxury of nothingness and then midnight fear simmers in simple desolation. Insomnia remembers. Advanced withdrawals. Unwanted overpowerings. Convenient amnesia. Heartbeat. Tick Tock. Birds in the attic strike old clichés. In backseats, subways, basements, graveyards the interlopers return. They creep around corners in after-hours classrooms, rough touch down there then run. Their tattoos ooze liquid shame into my forever after. Somebody moans, zombies in the hall. Undead, they wander the night in me.

The night in me, too.

**************************************************

Sometimes courage comes in a circle of women willing to look darkness in the eye.  There are words and lines in this poem that came out of a recent retreat read-back process. This experiment, along with the recent explosion of women writing “ME TOO” on their Facebook pages led me look at the innumerable invisible marks so many of us (including me) wear inside our skin.

BLR for the Poplar Grove Muse