09-09-2025

 

Michael Walsh

​

THE GHOST STORY THEY TELL ABOUT YOU

 

Dear Father, did you know the summer you spent in the hospital

in St. Peter for the dangerous and mentally ill,

 

I was in town too? I was falling in love with a boy

at summer camp, thinking about you in a straitjacket,

 

strapped down for shock therapy, drugged up

and playing cards with other lunatics, not that I knew

 

anything about your diagnosis or days. I only knew I blew

our best chance to meet. You couldn't leave.

 

I could've brought my secret boyfriend, a deck of cards,

dealt a game of hearts for three. I could've let you win.

 

Would you have told me what it felt like to nail your house

shut, window and door, your wife and daughter

 

asleep inside, how quiet you kept your hammer?

And after you started the fire, how you stuck around

 

to watch the show or split to smoke or pop something

in celebration? I would've listened because I want

 

to know who you were really burning, how

happy or terrible you felt when your wife wrenched

 

open a window, the two of them scared out of their minds.

I want to know what black magic charms you used

 

on my mother, then my aunt, while you called

our house saying I know where you live, bitch,

 

and I’m gonna getcha. For years I mouthed your threat

like the alphabet, those secondhand words.

 

How many teenage girlfriends did you get pregnant

in your forty-eight years, how many other kids still out there?

 

And why did women keep falling for you? There are no answers

about the night you and your brother, playing with a gun,

 

shot and killed your little sister. Did you pull

the trigger? Did you blame him? My mother swears it; my aunt

 

defends you. I want to know if that lie could've forced you

to your feet during the funeral after his suicide to cry out

 

You don’t know shit about pain to the priest. The day you chased

your mother with a knife out of her house, then your father

 

down the alley with a gun shooting wildly, I knew

I’d never know the truth about you. I was thirteen,

 

worried I might start hearing gravestones speak,

wake up one morning covered in my family’s blood.

 

THE QUEER AS ELECTRON

 

Knowing my identity

                                    in the family could shift

                  with each observer, I watched

 

                                    how a turn of phrase, a silence could switch me

from brother to cousin, from momma's boy

                                                      to daddy's bad seed, from gay

 

                  to confused virgin, and back again

                                                      in the blink of a sentence.

                                    Without moving, I dodged them.

 

                  Inside the whirling cloud

I formed myself in opposition

                                    to their background radiation.

 

MONK OF THE NEGATIVE

 

Clutching your throat, his hand

lifts your teenage body

 

to the barn wall. His body

presses into you, face

 

an inch away, eyes entering

your pupils, spare hand

 

adding more force now.

The ring his ten fingers form

 

mirrors the dark rings

you’re beginning to see

 

around the edge of each eye.

You understand what his hands

 

have wanted, have found

the permission to say. You fight

 

his face, pull its hair, punch

its eye. Both of yours

 

going out, you evaporate

somewhere deeper

 

than soul or brain.

Not a fall to anywhere

                                                                                                                                                              

but the obliteration of every atom,

accompanied by an oscillation

 

between bodiless peace

and black hole fear.

 

You stay still, you spin

at the same time. For a day,

 

then a week, many weeks

then months. Until he throws

 

the body you don't sense or know.

Your cheek scraped against

 

the floor returns, the rest of you

numb from neck to toe,

 

back to your weight

which must stand and say

 

I’m fine. Now wherever you go,

your body moves parallel

 

to the double who meditates

motionless inside you. Your hand

 

against the wall senses

it’s endless inside, understands the stone

 

you clutch and squeeze

contains only the emptiness,

 

a calming burst of antimatter

your pressure releases.

​

-from CREEP LOVE celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Founder and Editor, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

​

An independent scholar, creative writing instructor and writer, Michael Walsh received his B.A. in Creative Writing from Knox College and his M.F.A. in Creative and Professional Writing from the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities. He’s the editor of Queer Nature, the first ecoqueer poetry anthology. His poetry books include The Dirt Riddles (University of Arkansas Press) and Creep Love (Autumn House Press) as well as two chapbooks, Adam Walking the Garden and Sleepwalks (Red Dragonfly Press). His awards include a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship in Poetry, a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship, The Miller Williams Prize in Poetry and The Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. After residing in Minneapolis for more than two decades, Michael now lives in a valley among coulees and springs in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, where his ecoqueer and literary teachings are taking shape.