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Michelle Mitchell-Foust

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Ghost Story

What was once a dead ringer for dense treeline
lightens several hundred degrees, the full glacier
of Catalina, a phantom along its spleen.

Even the real trees miles inland lean in the direction
of the water, superstitious, a wooded fun-house
along the road, the trees unwavering as the tribe

Barnum pulled east, who slept inside the crowd at their display,
refusing to leave the museum for a second, and when Barnum
asked for the war dance, the dance was dangerous:

they saw no difference between the stage and the field,
no such thing as the fourth wall, and threw their hatchets
at the crowd until the showman begged for a wedding instead.

When the woman Do Humme died in the museum, her betrothed
cooked their various dishes, every day, placing them sizzling
on the museum roof, for her hungry sprit, and the visitors

never knew there were little bowls up there, hovering over the house
of wonders, over Tom Thumb and the 300 Living Australian Birds,
the humble offerings to a wondrous muse who flew from somewhere

between tower and tower, until the museum’s last day,
when the grain must have frozen, the bone gleaming with ice,
even as the building burned itself empty.

Michelle Mitchell-Foust teaches at Irvine Valley College CA. where she is managing editor for the The Ear magazine. She’s received a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia, is a winner of the Missouri Arts Council Writers’ Biennial Award, a fellowship in the 1995 Writers At Work Fellowship Competition, Columbia University’s writing competition and the 1996 Discovery/ The Nation award. Her work has been published internationally, selected pieces have been translated into Chinese. She’s currently working on her second novel and a biography of the comedian Phil Hartman.

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