And it is written:
You belong to no one.
Yet the dead own me.
What am I to make
of this strange paradox?
I see faces in the bathroom
mirror. I think they miss
this house where I now
live. Perhaps they are
trapped? Who, after all,
can tell the difference
between longing and duty?
But when I look again, they
disappear as if they were
never there at all. And I
thought that was my story.

*

Michelle Brooks’ work has been published or is forthcoming in Threepenny Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection, Make Yourself Small, was published by Backwaters Press, and her novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy, was published by Storylandia Press.