When she can’t sleep, my extraordinary self abandons
her bed for the car. She listens to rain hitting the roof,
watches it loop down the windshield and disappear

beneath the hood. Sometimes she takes a cup of tea
and stares as the liquid transforms to steam, smoke-like
wraiths rising to meet her chilled face. She’s haunted

by ghosts, of course, has always endured their cliché, banal
arrival: always at night, always with a show of low crying,
rustling sheets, banging doors, and furtive, moving shadows.

Often, they follow her to the car. The Ghost of
My Extraordinary Self Past feels most at home in the back playing
with seatbelt buckles and making requests for radio stations,

but she’s never happy with what’s played. Eventually she’ll settle
for an abandoned channel and its static song. The Ghost of
My Extraordinary Self Present prefers the front passenger side,

insists on adjusting the air vents, moves the seat back
and forth: reclined then upright. She never stays with one
position for long. It’s the Ghost of my Extraordinary Self

Yet to Come who’s least companionable. She manifests
in the trunk, and though my extraordinary self refuses
to walk around and release the door, we know somehow

this ghost is blindfolded, gagged, and trussed with rope.
Her terror is palpable. She thumps her head and moans.
But my extraordinary self turns up the static on the radio,

and wills the night to sheet the car with its wet noise.
Then morning comes, or the rain pauses, the ghosts
dissolve, and she sleeps in the brief, elliptical quiet.

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Image: Found photo, Gramercy Park, NYC, 1999