After the Dead Visit at Night

Kirsten Hemmy

Sometimes giggles

doors slam

once your heart stops

mid-dream &

you feel it

she presses your chest

his hot breath across

your cheek

pages turn

you are not alone.

Everything & nothing

simulacrum

of

reminders

they were here.

Shower.

Make dua.

Leave them

your stories.

Light blue

dream almost

creeps

across the room.

It is vast as

the Atlantic,

hull of a ship,

historical cargo.

Handbags, humans,

accoutrements of

colonial monsters

predecessors

to capitalism

dreams sinking

into sand

forever

a heaviness

that can

never be undone.

You are the ghost

of all the ancestors:

vomit-blood-feces

of what was made

then dismantled

ashes of disregard.

Repository of

silence. A silence

so quiet as to be

unremarkable.

Nights are routine

for you now—

they make noise

because they want

you to listen.

Eventually,

the adhan

of a foreign land.

Voices scurrying,

morning prayer,

& daylight

crawls back in.

Glossary:

dua – prayers

adhan – call to prayer

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Kirsten Hemmy’s first book, The Atrocity of Water, was a Tom Lombardo selection (Press 53, 2010). Her work has recently appeared in CaKe, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Antiphon, Compose Journal, Glass, The Comstock Review, and elsewhere. A featured TedX speaker and former Fulbright Fellow, Hemmy teaches creative writing and poetry at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman.