When I was little I enjoyed dreams of dying
gracefully on the jungle gym, flipping a turnover
bar, catching my neck on a swing, my fickle friends
falling apart in delicious grief. My remnants
would be gruesome and marked, but still beautiful.
I also dreamt a slow wasting sickly death
excusing me from math class. My usually
inattentive friends would say goodbye, apologize.
I would inform my mother who to exclude.
Another death in class, tripping, head bang blood on a desk, another
on the train tracks, so many good ways to die.
After all deaths my ghost haunted the strip of trees
behind our brick sprawl school, and I watched
my friends mourn, fail to enjoy their sad little lives.
Those dreams over 50 years old, now, and many of those children dead.
But still I live on reluctantly, mourning my own ghost.
Sara Eddy’s full-length poetry collection, Ordinary Fissures, was released by Kelsay Books in May 2024. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Tell the Bees (A3 Press 2019) and Full Mouth (Finishing Line Press 2020). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.
Image: “Alas, Baby Yorick” by Nicole Monroe
Pine Hills Review 