Signs That You’re Being Haunted by the Ghost of an Angsty, Teenage Girl

A poem about girlhood

Note: This poem has a format that reads better on larger screens!

1. Any of the following noises with increasing frequency:

   1. The crack of a can opening, the sizzle 

      of phantom diet coke.

   2. Bumps and/or thumps reverberating

      through the support beams. (Teenage

      ghosts walk into walls, not through them.)

   3. The muffled audio of “Young and

      Beautiful” by Lana Del Rey, as if bleeding

      through a door or one’s headphones.

2. A draft every night at 12 AM,

   cold like the night air creeping

   through a cracked-open window.

3. Notes of tangerine, sparkling champagne, and hibiscus.

4. Phone calls at all hours of the night

   from numbers you don’t recognize.

   A boy whose voice hasn’t dropped yet.

   A hotline. A panicked mother, screaming

   into the phone, asking you where has her baby gone?

   Her baby, her baby, her baby.

5. A tabby, silver as a stray slice of moonlight,

   who circles your property and does not stop

   yowling even at the offer of oil-soaked tuna.

   (He hasn’t forgotten her scent, not yet.)