I don’t believe in ghosts, I say

when the door creaks, when a rumble

of footsteps chase after no one

upstairs, when a thick hint of cigar

starts to fill the room. The dead

stay dead, they don’t creep around

while we sleep, rattling chains

we had long ago broken. Broken

old bones under the floorboards

don’t curse our foundations, we don’t

live unaware atop their desolation.

Their tears dried on our skin, their

cries like our cries, their fingers

gently brushing the back of our necks,

tightening, holding our breath. Death

is a door that shuts tight. The night

doesn’t whisper secrets of our past,

of broken oars and broken masts, sugar,

cotton, dyewood, ginger, iron bars and

iron shackles. Death is a door that shuts

tight. I don’t believe in ghosts, I say,

even as their echoes fill our lungs

like salt water.

*

Pablo Otavalo is from Cuenca, Ecuador, and now lives and writes in Illinois. A recipient of the 2013 and 2014 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition prize, his work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, RHINO Poetry, Jet Fuel Review, Structo Magazine, Levitate, No Tender Fences: An Anthology of Immigrant & First-Generation American Poetry, and other publications. We must find what we revere in each other.