Ghost Story
A Poem from The Dolomite Review
Today, instead of my own poetry, I want to introduce you to one of the poems from The Dolomite Review. This one struck close to home, as I am still more or less getting to know my own home, an historic “mansion” in the crook of Michigan’s thumb, along the Saginaw Bay.
The author is John Lennon, an English teacher and writer from Northern Michigan.
Ghost Story John Lennon When you buy a house, there are always mundane ghosts left behind to haunt you: Kitchen drawers teeming with instruction manuals obituaries of long-gone appliances. A well-worn cardigan forgotten in a closet, cigarette butts piled in a coffee can on the porch, decades old beer bottles with illegible labels cracked, tossed into the crawl space. Chairs circled in the basement where the dead might sit telling tired stories of dinners shared in the warmer rooms of the house. It’s juvenile, my fear of the basement, but I always imagine the worst. as if real ghosts collect like cobwebs when a crawlspace goes unkempt or poltergeists are the culprits behind the clanging pipes. So forgive me for sprinting up the stairs like the seance starts as soon as I shut the lights off. It’s easy to conjure up cold spots and lingering spirits in a house you are still learning to love.
For more great poetry, essays and short stories, visit The Dolomite Review here.