The Useless Degree | Page 9

The Suburbs are Haunted

By Amanda Needham

It wasn’t you.

I had to stand on my toes to look into the coffin, but it looked all wrong

curling like dead petals and drying heavily veined.

Moving on, they say, is hard with your hair around my neck like the prettiest noose

in a shade of bloodshot blonde we once audaciously called sunset.

It is not a red sky at night when the sun is rising. It was a warning.

My elderly neighbour whispers over the fence that the neighbourhood has gone to shit since the ghosts moved in.

They drink too much and leave their empty eyed children to run wild,

ring doorbells,

below ominously from the manicured treeline.

“At least they are white,” she shrugs.

As hopeful as I am of spirits you are never among them.

Do you sometimes liner in the periphery? A black streak I could explain away as my unbound hair,

an exhale on my neck late at night,

an endearment moaned in a language I do not speak.

These houses were built quickly, cheaply and cannot contain so much as the heat in midwinter-

much less the ghost of you

I was sure I did not see.

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