“The enduring legacy of the Opera Ghost” by Brian Nielsen

Eric the Opera Ghost died quietly

In the dungeons underneath the Paris Opera House.

Destiny, he realized, had not chained

Christine Daae to him

And he left this world having never been loved.

Christine, feeling pity for him,

Kissed him, left him for dead,

And returned to her life.

Now Christine did not hear this,

But before Eric died, he cursed humanity.

He said the others like him would follow.

Every town and every generation

Has its own opera ghost.

He’s the child who can’t sleep

Sunday nights because he’s afraid to go to school on Monday.

She’s the woman ostracized

For experimenting with her sexuality.

He’s the drunk on the corner,

Bitter because life betrayed him.

He’s the metalhead, the goth, the freak.

He’s the weirdo you belittle

Everyday at the bus stop.

Now Eric did not curse those like him

To a life of humiliation and torture.

He knew that some would rise up

Out of the dungeon

To take their vengeance

And reclaim their dignity.

The new opera ghosts

Are the Tim Burtons and Stephen Kings

Of the world.

Unfortunately, They are also the Edmund Kempers

And Eric Harrises and Dylan Klebolds of the world.

Either way, The New opera ghosts

Rub humanity’s face in the feces

Of its own evil and condemnation.

How do I know all this?

I myself am an opera ghost,

Just beginning to emerge from the dungeon

“When I am asked about my Mother” by Audrey Connor

 

When they found a tumor in my mother’s brain, not “malignant” my father told me with uncertainty hidden in the exhale of the word;
her hospital room filled with the dread that comes from having to be strong for someone else
and I left to go visit a friend I barely knew for dinner,
and my father yelled at me for not being a good child;
and the knife that I took to my sixteen-year-old skin;

When I came home from treatment seven months later and all of my belongings were stacked neatly in boxes;
the friends that didn’t come over anymore;
the silence at the dinner table no one ate at;
the brand of being “dysfunctional” as told from the mouths of psychology professionals;
the smell of cheap Bath and Bodyworks candles trying to melt the cold distance between her daughter and her husband;

When she told me that as soon as my brother left home, they wouldn’t need to be married anymore;

When my brother hadn’t left home yet and they didn’t need to be married anymore;

the awkward breakfast after the fact;
the friends’ houses I stayed at;
the calls telling me how much I was missed;

When they found her in a pool of blood having a seizure on the floor of the office where she was trying to open a gym membership;
my dad being in the hospital room where I wasn’t allowed;
the uncomfortable hug between my parents in the living room;
the flashlight she needed for the walk home because she couldn’t drive anymore;
the lifetime of insistence that it’s not my fault; I don’t need to worry; really, she’s just fine;

When we were eating pizza at thanksgiving and I couldn’t stop staring at her stitches;

When she sends me texts telling me I am “amazing” and how “proud she is of me”;

When I am asked, how is your mother these days?

When I say, “she’s alright”

 

“Birthmark” by Danielle Estelle

(after Tim Johnson accused me of never writing anything again)

Let’s get some things straight: for all the bridges I’ve burned behind me without looking back this stage, this page is not and will never be one of them.

Tim Johnson, perhaps it’s my collegiate athletic career that forces me to see everything through a tunnel-vision of competition but for the record books, this is an answer to what I considered a challenge.

When you accused me of never coming back of putting down the pen of treating my writing as some psychological stage of life

I was reminded that the only thing any of us broke down the doors of this life with was a shotgun full of noise screaming like broken dams and explosions. Poems are just our attempts to channel the freedom that God wrapped us in like a blank canvas that’s what poetry is to me freedom, and a blank canvas.

Every nightmare has taught me we can’t escape the things we’ve broken or the things broke us but whenever I open this book one page away there is always a slate that looks the way life does the moment before it begins: wet cement and a pond that has not yet rippled. Blank canvases, beginnings, and also lifeboats.

All those months, those days, those nights, when the dark was at its brightest when I could hardly wake without weeping when the tears flowed free because grief mistook my cheeks for fire escapes when my chest was falling like an anvil heavy with all the empty inside it,

Still I held a pen still I exhaled a voice one spark so small but goddammit a spark all the same!

Genesis 2:7 The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life and the man became a living being.

Where there is breath, there is sound for us to reclaim to rearrange like fresh coats of paint and, yes, sometimes we have to beat the words like blacksmiths over this worktable of a world.

They are malleable, not like my inertia so when I bend too far for my ironclad soul to manage poems wrap themselves around this frame like oil in a gear-shaft.

If nothing else the stages I have stood on the microphones I have taken the pens I have stolen are all just a part of my desperation to create something. After all, sunsets come from dynamite.

So, dearest Tim, don’t think for one second that I’ll abandon my birthright this is just one more way of breathing this is just one more way of shot-gunning down the doors this is just one more way of screaming.