a.
The dead possess and are obsessed with bodies. I know this because once I turned sixty-five, my body turned on me with apparitions crouching at every crooked turn my body took, drooling to repo it. My hands became my mother’s. My lopsided pouch is Aunt Sue who wore a two-piece for way too long. My great big butt sits on Great Uncle Joe, a secret only Joe and I know. My body has turned into gladhanding ghosts.
b.
And more dreadful still, my head room, the attic above the shoulder landing, is also fully stocked—mother and father, of course, and my bubby praying over Shabbat candles, her dancing digits weaving fine lace from incinerator smoke and Great Aunt Sadie, beet red to the elbows from her caldron of borsht, and further back are chutes and ladders down passages of time for relatives to climb into bunkbeds between my ears, cackling and mewling in ancient syllables known by my bones.
c.
At night, when I settle in beneath my inherited crazy quilt, the revenants congregate for their rowdy picnic, resuming fights and affairs and jokes and gibes from centuries past on a checkered blanket where greasy wing- and wishbones have been sucked and shucked. Most in attendance are among the dead, though a few remain alive and ride their sleigh beds on the sly to the ghosty meet, secretly preparing for their next adventure by visiting invisible kin, rehearsing reverse visitations before the hearse is due.
d.
(Though kept alert all night by irreverent irrelevant gossipy revenants is far preferred over falling into a cozy eiderdown dream where liars and rogue-tongued demons preside.)
e.
At the ghosts’ post-autumnal picnic before the starry backdrop of eternity, I bask in developer as my masks dissolve. The relatives bring me into their mutual scheme, and we forego our cycling skinsuits and fence between snowflake lace, hexagonal lattice that flurries at first, till accretion vanishes us, vanquishes us, ravished by cold. No wonder ghosts are drawn to dawn in frozen sheets of sleet. No wonder winter-white blankets cadavers, disappearing them by an abracadabra.
f.
To study the self, to forget the self.
g.
How spiral winds sheathed in stark feathers form eddies that enclose the alien green Soul I inherited from Bubby that appears to evanesce on the road while our essence is wombed within the muffled vehicle, viewing winter mind from behind a shimmying, spinning wheel.
~
Martine Bellen is the author of ten books, most recently, An Anatomy of Curiosity (MadHat Press, 2023) and additionally, This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil); The Vulnerability of Order (Copper Canyon Press); and Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems (Sun & Moon Press), which won the National Poetry Series Award. Her novella 2X2 was published by BlazeVOX [books]. Her work has appeared in the anthologies The Best American Poetry,2023, edited by Elaine Equi and Poetry Is Bread, edited by Tina Cane (Nirala Publications, 2025) as well as other books and literary journals. Bellen has been a recipient of the Queens Art Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the American Academy of Poets Award and has received a residency from the Rockefeller Foundation at the Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy.