by Jayne Marek
Get a Glass of Water
The ghost of the former owner
lingered at the foot of my parents’
bed wearing the same top hat
that would appear in his obit
the next day. That’s how they knew
it must be him. He tried to scare
them away. My mother shrieked.
He disappeared. My parents stayed.
They were young and loved
the land he’d planted. The pear trees
whose gnarled limbs I tangled
with as a kid; the grape vines
bearing green globes shot
with seeds; the blackberry brambles
that pricked my fingers, stained
my palms road-kill purple.
When the former owner lived
there, factory workers up the hill
flipped cans of solvents upside-
down. The poison seeped deep
into the ground, filling
the hamlet’s water table
with invisible carcinogens.
The ghost tried to warn us,
as the dead learn too late
what did them in.
Once, he whispered in my ear:
Get a glass of water.
I did. I stood at the top of the stairs
with it, like a doomed character
on stage, I didn’t understand.
I drank it.
Thirteen years passed. I left
for college. The chemicals reached
my parents filling a prostate,
a pancreas, killing them like a pear
that swells with a bruise, rots off
the stem and is swarmed by bees.
Katie Kemple’s poems have been published by Ploughshares, The South Carolina Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. More of her work can be found at katiekemplepoetry.com. X @kkemple Insta/Threads @kemplekatie FB https://www.facebook.com/katie.kemple.
Jayne Marek’s writings and photos appear in Rattle, Terrain, The New York Times, Spillway, Bloodroot, Calyx, Catamaran, One, Gulf Stream, and elsewhere. She has provided cover art for Typehouse, Chestnut Review, Silk Road, Bombay Gin, Amsterdam Quarterly’s 2018 Yearbook, and The Bend, as well as for four full-length poetry books. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she writes, photographs, and learns about natural history. https://www.pw.org/content/jayne_marek.