she; ghost

She blew the smoke from her cigarette into my face- it bound around my head like a thread, stitching my nostrils together.

If I shut my eyes I am there-

I can still smell damp cement;

oh, how the walls creep in at night.

Paint over chipped bricks, layered

over

and over our

stories of touch

and I could’ve sworn I saw a ghost

there

once

and as she trailed into the bathroom, I followed

a smog- thick-

my hands first shrank away from her touch:

the ribs of the walls exhaled again;

I reached out anyway-

we sat in the bathtub together-

the tap dripping onto tin,

caught under a smoke, shut eyelids

not wanting to believe

the dream:

she was gone even sitting there.

No surprises

when the bathtub filled up its’

lungs and sucked her back out again.

A tornado down the drain;

her face-

porcelain-

did not return

in the second breath.

And when daylight drew in fog like a cigarette,

her hand turned to dishwater

in the ripple of chipped paint

The bricks breathed away.

No eyes for any eyes now.