BY CATE MCGOWAN
Every Body Has Ghosts
Below a yellowed tree,
weeds fringe the driveway’s
borders. Anoles pump.
They jut, and the bigger
lizards skitter along
the yard’s edge. While
daylight’s needles stitch
threads up the spathodea,
seven DeKay’s snakes slue
like scarves through
the new ivy. Though
it’s already five o’clock,
I haven’t heard from you
yet. Not this week.
Not this month. You’re
gone without a word.
So far, only green silence.
Someone next door opens
a second floor window,
and a toddler shrieks
and shatters the stillness.
The child’s cry skylarks
the mimosa, shrinks,
then dissipates through
the evening’s haze. I shake
out our wet clothes.
In the breeze, the clothesline
snaps my red blouse
as it dances, my empty sleeves
waving in the wind to no one.
Cate McGowan is a fiction writer, essayist, and poet. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Norton's Flash Fiction International, Glimmer Train, Crab Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Crab Fat Magazine, Ellipsis Zine, Barrelhouse, Shenandoah, Into the Void, Louisville Review, Atticus Review, Vestal Review, Unbroken, and elsewhere. A native Georgian, McGowan's an Assistant Fiction Editor for Pithead Chapel and is pursuing her Ph.D. She won the 2014 Moon City Short Fiction Award for her debut short story collection, True Places Never Are, published in 2015, and her debut novel, These Lowly Objects, is forthcoming from Gold Wake Press.