Elinor Ann Walker

How Lost Words Haunt Like Wings Behind Glass

How Lost Words Haunt Like Wings Behind Glass (a cento) The ghost girl/ makes no noise, a restless ghost in a house the wind owns; there was no fanfare no terror only a blue silhouette forever in your house, in your garden, in corridors, our own omissions in a room; she will spend all day counting their shadows like stitches opening, and ghost- like butterflies, errant and flamboyant, unanswered messages like ghosts in the throat the way a lost/ word/ will come back/ unbidden — with its no one without its I — glass, ghostly opposition, vowel that I would be—dryadic, gothic, fanatic against a spirit-lantern to spin shapes inside: one need not be a chamber to be haunted only myself. You see, I was the ghost there’s no such thing/ as an unhaunted house. Sources: lines from poems that reference spirits or haunted places by Rae Armentrout, Charles Baudelaire, Lucie Brock-Broido, Andrea Cohen, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Emily Dickinson, Carolyn Forché, Cynthia Huntington, Elizabeth Jennings, Donika Kelly, Ben Lerner, Ada Limón, Eric Pankey, Ruben Quesada, Natalie Rose Richardson, Brenna Twohy, Mark Wunderlich Notes: slashes denote line breaks in originals; italics and em dashes are original, not mine. 
Elinor Ann Walker holds a Ph.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill and is on the poetry staff at River Heron Review. Recent poems appear in AGNI, Nimrod, Plant-Human Quarterly, Plume, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Terrain, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Fugitive but Gorgeous (forthcoming), won the 2024 Sheila-Na-Gig First Chap Prize.

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