This is for Thailurr.
Maureen lived in Monticello before the flood;
now she haunts the Spanish moss that drapes
and adorns gnarled oak and long-deserted tombs.
She carefully presses her fingertips every morning
to the windows of her father’s split-level ranch,
but no one can see the ghosts of her fingertips,
because the tangible world rejects them now.
She lives in the warm dampness that constricts
and consumes the part of you that remembers
her cold body next to yours, her skin a tint of blue,
no longer pressing passion into the stale sheets.
She rested stiffly against your pillow that morning,
an empty beer in her hand, a pause in time between her lips.
You left her there, for the flood to rise up
and take her body down into the muddy river.
