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INSPECTRE

By 

E. H. Brogan

I still look like something but

often now forget the detailed what.

I am an old hat expert come to haunting, so it happens.

I show up down the main streets of one small town, my town where I breathed before with everyone who’s since

exhaled into a real-life, living still while I —

        spectre spectere spectator

    showily left the plane, or twice to only keep on coming back to pace sidewalks, pass former restaurants, eye smoking-porches for looks

I would’ve recognized back when —

    in vivo corporealis verum est

or when I breathe the past in, days I batted lashes over rims of Coca-cola-refracted pint glasses, carbon sparkling with

one lime wedge, a double-pour of sugarcane

fermented, distilled until the sugarcane like me has ended

and in its shape another eddied muddled muddied darker

how you would see if you looked out under your skin,

if you cut windows in —

what I mean is cane replaced with fresh animus,

residue the weight a breath is which you’d recognize under another label, maybe more a mortal one. So here, mere or simply, my answer among a whole.

What’s the name I have I turn my head back to?

    Whisper me out loud —

succarum libatio rum spiritus sancti rum spiraculum

rum succarum rum—

Somehow I walk, evaporate, scent 

streets I leave behind. I walk, I’m rum, 

I walk, I rum. It’s just me

and me with me, the 

ghost of me. One, alone.

Quiz question:

The poem's italicized text is in which language?

French

French

Spanish

Spanish

Latin

Latin

English

English

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Issue 20

published 

September 22, 2017

E. H. Brogan is a graduate of the University of Delaware with a B.A. in English. You can read her poetry at places like Cider Press Review, Bop Dead City, FLAPPERHOUSE, the Sandy River Review, and Red Paint Hill. You can read her prose in PRIMITIVE magazine. Her house is built of unread books, and she pronounces it REE-see's PEE-sees. Tweet @wheresmsbrogan for more.

i dont feel like fininishing this website right now and i am sorry

Drinking and smoking

is easy but it won't help

you in the long run.

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Issue 20

This writing was originally published in Opium Magazine, and is not listed in the Lit.cat archives.
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