pair of jeans, early-aughts-Renaissance-style corset top, grey military blazer that’s been making me look cooler than I am since the twelfth grade

no longer fits is always met with denial. I squeeze my shoulders into the armpits, loosen ties, hold my breath, limit the constricting garment

to morning outings, change back into sweats after my second meal, when the buckle can no longer contain my hunger. A few more tries before I tuck it back

Maybe we were never star-crossed, flames tossed over skies drowning in indigo and Jupiter’s moons. I don’t know if I knew that it would be love or heartbreak or roadkill stranded on asphalt, but I knew it was an asteroid, meteoric impact, apocalyptic collision. The first moment I saw him feels more like an omen I never saw coming until the prophecy laid itself out like a soiled sheet on the yellowed mattress. His red t-shirt an expanse of warnings I disregarded for the kaleidoscope hazel around the black holes of his pupils. Maybe I give the heavens too much credit. Maybe I died when I was nineteen, and the ghosts inhabiting my body are echoes of misremembering. Maybe we were just reflections on black ice, bad timings, misplaced mistletoe in August.

The birds are singing at night, in silent snowscapes where touch is the only color left.

Ghost stories rise with decaf steam and smoke from candles I’ve left burning.

Even solitude has a hum to it, and I carry each small catastrophe like a violin string

against the bow of my breastbone. Does time open up old wounds too?

Do I linger like an old lover’s perfume? You want the moon? I spend my days

Kissing under a maple leaf, amber as the ghost of sunlight in November. I want to press it between pages, memorize it by hand and midnight.

Barren trees claw at the sky line like hell’s sinners grasp at heaven. The world outside is dying, while something inside me wakes. I adorn myself like an altar

for the dead, fill my hollow heart with chrysanthemums and marigolds and frost bite. I’m dreaming of mornings that rain teeth, nights like mulled hauntings retold

December defaults to fields of frost. Distant lanterns glow in the apocalyptic fog spread over the prairies like puddles of blankets on childhood’s living room floor. I bake sugar cookies for my inner girl, cradle her with clammy hands like a gentle reclamation. When the temperature drops and the nights yawn early, I salt solstice oil in stars, glaze the walls in bonfire hues, sun catchers hooking the hearth fire and casting out homemade auroras across the table wearing rings of kept vows and formative years. December, they call you a slow death, slick street on a starless night, but you are the foundation in my architecture of growth. You made me pick up my pen again.

The long walk home is a lip’s distance away, mere breaths between greetings and goodbyes.

I wear the forest like armor—a ritual that keeps me soft on these endless clean days. There is a sanctuary

of stillness in the midwinter wolf song, a blank page on a cold, velvet throat. My memories of younger

days are scars that keep me warm while snowed in at the metro station: a sun-child born on the apex

I lock my sadness in a storage box with a bedsheet that knows, too well, the architecture of my body. I hold the chill in my lungs a little longer, exhale at the boarded up house on the edge of town, a light left on like a Yule flame, nasturtium bookmark tucked into the loam of a silent night. This is how you survive yourself: you gather your aches and rebuild them into a bonfire, let the warmth hold you like soil hugs the roots of a grave under haunted prairie grass. Sometimes it’s scary, but you can douse long drives and longer silences in starlight. You can bury a memory in the perfect shade of walnut and dirt and wait for spring. Dawn always cracks like eggs on cast iron. Your reflection always smiles before you do.

They tell me not to romanticize ghosts, but you are the celestial break in a black night, iridescent spill of aurora borealis over snow, and I am a deer in the glow of Christmas lights, willing our shadows to touch what our flesh won’t. They tell me not to dig up graves, but I am filling your head with tomb-laid forget-me-nots. I am a rain-soaked notebook confessing soggy truths in a ceremony of flickering candles and cracking roots, mistakes I’d make again if it meant tethering my moon to your night. You taste like cinnamon and bad decisions I want to wake up regretting. They tell me not to raise the dead, but your eyes are blurred and beckoning, and I am starving for the haunt.

I was trying to survive the misty melancholy mornings of an ancient anguish like a third marriage breeding children of ink. I was lethargic with seasonal transition, yet restless with becoming, inspired by the cadence of sleet turned flurry, harmony of the quiet, eyes in the cornfield flickering like fireflies now almost extinct.

If sorrow is a sickness, I am terminal with constellations of sadness. My winter coat has more structure than my life, but feather and thread can’t type, can only keep me upright for so long, and I cannot waste a rare moment of golden apricity, cracking December’s cardinal egg shell, bruising in the brumal lake of your email.