Ghost Campus

By Michelle Bitting

~ spring, late Covid time, 2021


Mostly it’s been just me
and my winter shadow
walking the fog,
unlatched from a safe
and solitary burrow to work
my lungs and unshorn legs,
make sure I’m alive, check
my breath against a mirror
scrap of the afternoon’s last light.
Maybe a couple Cooper Hawks
circle overhead—wings
spread, holding up the final sun—
a life of suspension
until one dive bombs the other,
hot for whatever livid thing’s
squirming in the opposite’s beak,
nabbed from dead brush
a minute back. Once in a while
a stray student or custodian
and I cross paths, our masks
and distance maintained
like the vivid hibiscus
and grass between us. I can’t help
how my voice and wrist
suddenly wag from afar,
my hand rocketing
skyward like a flare or flag
in flames, a lunatic waving
from her lone cell, my feral
            Hello Hello!
that bolts without warning
or premeditated thought.

Poor captive morsel,
            little mouse
            in my mouth—
fighting so hard
to free itself. 

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Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, won the 2018 Fischer Poetry Prize, Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, and a fourth collection of poetry, Broken Kingdom, won the 2018 Catamaran Prize and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2018. In 2021, her manuscript, Nightmares & Miracles, won the Wilder Prize and will be published by Two Sylvias Press in 2022. She is a Lecturer in Poetry and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount U.

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