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.
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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