One sees ghosts in this town
every now and then. You cross
the rusty metals, one saying,
‘Welcome’ and the other, ‘Hope
you had a buce stay’ you forget
about the sightings. You cannot
recall the cold touches and frosty glasses.
You become a non-believer again.
We attribute this to the magnetic fields.
We know something about the attraction
and a lot about repulsion, but nothing
about the ghosts. We tried to name them.
They exchange those amongst themselves.
We don’t know them although they talk all the time.
It is not their murmuring that startles us.
Sometimes, like now, they pass through us
without paying heed to our greetings.
I call at the couple who passed through my ribs,
“Hey!” They turn. If my voice has conveyed
mild contempt my irritation means nothing to them.
I am a stranger. They are an old book shop.
I read the history of my kind. The dust
makes me sneeze. The history doesn’t
read me. It turns, the way they, the deceased couples
turns and smiles to something behind me,
and I turn to see who it is, but everything
seems the usual, my mother gardening
the way she used to before her death, walls made
with bricking the red, flower bed with a snake skin,
no one to make them nervous, and that smile
displays an endeavour to hide the hidden shivering.
I turn and turn again, and see the sky, pigeons with necks
that makes them bloody. The ghosts watch
someone even in this town I cannot see.
I feel the fear for the first time and may be the last.
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Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor
Kushal Poddar lives in Kolkata, India
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