off track. I’m a ghost. Let’s say that I’m the ghost.

Now say my name, I can’t remember how it sounded

coming from your mouth. It feels like I have so little

to look back to. Fewer moments than hands are able to

hold. The point is that one of us is dead and it doesn’t

matter anymore which is which.

It just doesn’t matter.

EVIDENCE SUGGESTING MY DOWNSTAIRS NEIGHBOR IS TERRIBLY LONELY

She shouts on the phone for hours, filling our

apartments with inescapable background noise.

When she puts the speaker on full volume, she can

close her eyes and almost imagine the other line

is sitting beside her.

She’s never been alone like this before,

isn’t sure how to lie in bed without accommodating

a man’s torso. I have to assume the walls are choked

by framed photographs, given her incessant pounding

on them at all hours. Unsteady nails hammered

with unsure hands, taken down by the slightest

whisper, the weakest sigh.

My downstairs neighbor has spent her life twisting

loose ends into place, insisting that they were never

broken to begin with. They always belonged to her.

I imagine that she’s heard my love and me, before.

These walls are thinner than my patience. I imagine

she’s heard us try to quote Dirty Dancing in front of

the television, squeals when he sneaks up behind me

mid-dishes, bombarding my neck with kisses. Our

singing, our footsteps rushing towards one another,

his steady voice as he teaches me

the best way to light a match and peel a boiled egg.

All reminders of what she lost, and how long it’s been

since she lost it.

It makes sense that she’d feel bitter with that sort of

affection constantly hanging over her head. No

wonder she feels the need to cry into these early

spring nights for somebody, anybody, to listen, just

listen, please, for thirty seconds, to her voice. I

suppose I’d also feel desperate if I started to realize

that the ruckus has just been a way to camouflage the

silence, the oppressive and suffocating absence.

I suppose, then, I’d finally hear the quiet, in all its

unflinching, awful honesty, and be frightened by it,

too.

1234

the slice of fresh mozzarella you

bring me from the kitchen

in the middle of preparing our dinner

crumbles on my tongue like a sigh of relief.

in the quiet hours of our lives

you have reinvented love for me.

I DIDN’T WANT TO CRY OVER THIS

but you always ask me to cut the onions

and I always do, because I love you.

It was December, the first time I witnessed tears

bubble over your eyelashes.

We were handmaking pierogies, vegetables scattered

across the countertop, and I was thinking about

tradition. How every holiday moving forward

I want something to call ours.

I didn’t have a family that pushed dough between