Cover art: Juniper
Artist: Gershom

Foreword

In what ways do the things left behind after suicide take on the shadowy form of the one we’ve lost? In Dear Ghost, Donna Spruijt-Metz explores grief as channeled through objects–a roll of parchment paper that “doesn’t ever seem / to run out,” an antique Sake cup, an “eviscerated dog plushie.” Every object becomes a reflection of its ghost and also a reflection of the mourner.

What objects call to us in the absence of those we love, those who have left us too soon and with so many reminders that they once roamed the same world we still inhabit?

In exquisitely crafted language and unexpected images, Spruijt-Metz draws us into the invisible, complex world of grief as it exists in interaction with objects remaining. Where do ghosts find us and how do we embrace them as “roof of water,” “bent angel,” “creaky vision?” Dear Ghost, is a testimony of grief unlike any other I’ve read. It asks us to remain with tenderness but also reveals the absurdity and irony of what we can still hold in our hands as our most cherished ones slip away. Their lingering is a constant reminder of our own hearts beating in tune and in time with our memories, our mourning, our “most tender protest.” Each poem in this micro-chapbook stands as a testament to the certainty of mortality and the unexpected places we find immortality—to the ways in which the dead continue to live amongst us and within us. Spruijt-Metz is an important, fresh, unique voice in the canon of grief writing and specifically around loss to suicide; Dear Ghost, opens a new path into its formidable mysteries.

Joan Kwon Glass
2023

Sarah Returns to Me as Kirkland Culinary Parchment Paper

I’ve got Adele blasting on repeat, my earbuds in,
even in my own studio. They seem better at blocking,
better than surround sound at drowning

it out, drowning out your absence. But it’s no use. It’s the fifth month
of noise. By now I know the signs, yet it always catches me
off guard. My peripheral vision

shimmers slightly right before you

show up. Tonight, you take the form
of the jumbo box of parchment paper
you once bought for us. I touch the box. you

brush my shoulder. That’s how it goes. I shock to stillness,
vision vibrating on infrared, feeling the warmth
of your slight body,

as if you were unhung. As if the scaffolding
were undone. As if magic, like the way that roll
of parchment doesn’t ever seem

to run out, oh restless ghost, the way
you did.
I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be unkind. I am just

howling into your vanishing point,
which has so expertly given the illusion
of death.

Sarah Returns to Us as a Dwindling Supply of Active Dry Yeast

I carry my laptop from desk to kitchen. I paw through the refrigerator, looking for what we might need—which would, of course, not be there, so I am looking for what is absent. I return to my screen. What am I missing? Baking supplies, the shopping bot suggests. Baking supplies, I murmur. My husband says he has everything he needs, except soon he will need yeast for the first time in almost two years. At the beginning of the pandemic, everyone decided to bake their own bread. There was no yeast to be found anywhere—no yeast to make our breads rise. Sarah found a bulk package of yeast for sale at a bakery. She was brilliant that way, in her finding. We divided it up, bagged it and froze it. Little bags of ascension, islands of clear speech, just waiting for us to reach into where things are frozen and retrieve them.

Sarah Returns to Me as a 100% Organic Cotton Round

Touch, as a form of collision
           —Carl Phillips

You once asked if I needed them. I didn’t think I did.
But you, in that way of yours—being so unsure of the needs
of love, or friendship, or even a conversation—yet confident
in your knowledge of the objects that people needed—comfort
by vegetable, by rice, by small porcelain bowls of great
simplicity and thus great beauty, by mobile phone stands—I stand
before the mirror tonight, cotton round in hand, and I hear
cotton round—in a voice that is undeniably yours—your accent—you,
giving all the o’s their due, their roundness.
—I’m a little spooked, yet glad of the visit—thinking how it might
have been for you—towards the end—unmedicated, hearing voice
after voice after voice—or maybe after is the wrong word—so many
you once told me—and some worse than others.
But what do I know? You asked me if I needed cotton rounds
Yes. I learned to need them.

Sarah Returns to Me as a Hairdresser’s Fine Mist Spray Bottle Repurposed for Disinfecting Surfaces with Everclear

Omicron has shut us all down again—
again, we pry our tentacles from the lives
we had just begun to reclaim. My daughter
brings me groceries—and I find myself
spraying down the counters—again—with the
Hairdresser’s Fine Mist Spray Bottle. It’s the large one
you gave us along with the travel bottle—
for our trips to the desert—to disinfect
the Airbnb or the VRBO—you wanted us to be
prepared for all contingencies—to be
safe. So today, to honor that wish, I spray
down the counters and thank you again—unsheathe
your absence like a blade. You thought the pandemic was
over—you thought you could leave us to it—but no. Where
can I file a complaint—spray it out
like fine mist—so that you—from the other side—will register
this—my most tender protest?

Sarah Returns to Me as a Fleeting Image of Her Left Wrist Accessorized with Rubber Bands

dozens of them, worn as if bracelets, as if precious gold and jade bangles, adorning her
all the way up her forearm—she used them to keep things together—five packets of Wild Planet
salt-free skipjack tuna packed in water, two sixpacks of Swedish Dishcloths

—or to keep things together that fell into the same category—as she saw it—
Yau Choy with Gai Lan, toothbrush and vegetable brush—

also useful to keep things closed that needed to stay closed—the box of extra-large brown
organic eggs, the 16 ounce box of triple washed baby spinach.

I saved the rubber bands—they seemed so intimate, somehow—souvenirs
of her weekly precision shopping—

until the pandemic, we could never find a rubber band in the house when we needed one—
now, I have a whole collection in the cutlery drawer.

The countless times I open this drawer every day—always, her slender wrist.

Sarah Returns to Us as an Eviscerated Dog Plushie

saturated with saliva—the pups worry it, fight
over it, pull each other across the floor with it—jaws
clenched down hard on it. It’s the effigy of a doctor—a gift
from Sarah—the idea being that since our daughter
is a doctor—I don’t need to finish that thought—or maybe
I can’t. Who could understand her multitude twisty pathways
to kindness? This particular destroyed toy had escaped
the rubbish bin—hidden itself behind the couch,
and tonight, it was miraculously (if you are a dog)
fished out—but what do we know of destroyed?
The dogs are ecstatic over this foul shell of a thing
—as if it somehow brings her back—
even though they had long ago pulled out
the stuffing—disemboweled the squeaky part.

Sarah Returns to Me in the Form of a Ghazal

—after Psalm 104, verses 1-6

I read the verses—each slow to its soul.
I sit with locks and keys—tinkering this stone soul.

This light—merciful, cruel, concealing. Your ghost never leaves.
The darkness of it crosses the light of my eyes. What to do, my one lone soul?

I am building something. Not a scaffold. No—a roof of water. Fall through
and be carried—float the seas of our detriment, to the safety of a known soul.

Your ghost never leaves—bent angel, refracted through quartz—just
outside my line of vision— a signpost towards my moss-grown soul.

Creaky vision, precarious—persistent—in every corner of the house I might
meet you—if I don’t blunder past, in pointless hurry, trying to protect my blown soul.

And above us—water—above the mountains—water—it oscillates above us,
through us—my blood and your no-longer-blood can hymn here, sewn souls.

Sarah Returns to Me in the Form of Questions I Never Got to Ask My Father about Abandonment

Here you are as the photographer saw you that day—
gentle, folded in upon yourself—a week or so after

your first hospitalization. You were just coming back

to life. Finally, a diagnosis, a label. And with it came
medication. Your life blurred. Your art atrophied.
You, bright and fragile, were caught
in the undertow. In time, you made your choice.

What transmutes life, finally, into something
unbearable? Dear ghost, what made the choice

to step over seem—inevitable?

What were you feeling right before you kicked
away the chair? I imagine you doubted, at some point,
paused in your careful planning—
but you didn’t—change your mind, that is—not finally.

What was he feeling right before he began
swallowing his curated feast of pills and
powders? As he continued to swallow?

I imagine what you could have felt—deluged,

maybe—but it always comes back again
to this, to me, to her—to that child in me

—asking, did he think of me? Did you?

Could I have, somehow, changed the course?

I light the candles, scry the flame—I consider it—but stop
at summoning your spirit—it seems unkind—to call you
back to this place that you could, perhaps,
no longer tolerate—even as you hover here.

Would I call you back, father? Summon you?

No. I imagine you all those years ago—your world
vibrating around you—slow, at first—but at some point
the vibrating became too much—too high pitched—
and you vortexed.

Sarah’s Antique Sake Cup

—after Psalm 107, verses 11-15

Truth is, if you swat flies in the kitchen, towel-snapping
like a high-schooler in the locker room,
shit is gonna break.

Chipped once by my carelessness—
now shattered. I want to say by your bravado—but
it was just bad luck. Breakage—so much of it—

collateral damage. The cup—of delicate white porcelain—beyond repair—

we could go either way—anger and anguish—or
dustpan and broom. After all, the cup is just one thing less that our child
won’t want—and it turns out we recall Sarah fine without.

It was beautiful, though. Translucent, seductive—always the promise of knowing it—
although never quite being able to know it—placed on the kitchen windowsill
so she could see that we appreciated it—and so we could look at it

again and again—our weary morning glances made less weary
by its symmetry—then the serious beholding, as late afternoon sun

glowed through it—a cathedral
between worlds

Ghost Triolet

—after Psalm 105 lines 28-33

Flower-thin darkness came down around you,
genius of things that fit into things—my ghost child
fit fish into water, blood into fish, pale into blue.
Flower-thin darkness came down around you,
crowding things into your hungry heart until you
crowded yourself out. Frictioning leafless and wild,
flower-thin darkness came down around you,
genius of things that fit into things—my ghost child.

Notes

1. The line "Your ghost never leaves" in "Sarah Returns to Me in the Form of a Fragment of Psalm 104" is from the song "Fire in my Hands" by Iain Morrison.
2. The photograph in "Sarah Returns to Me in the Form of Questions I Never Got to Ask My Father about Abandonment" is by Photography @ James Walker and is used with permission.

Acknowledgements

Bracken: "Sarah’s Antique Sake Cup"
Nimrod Journal: "Sarah Returns to Me as a Fleeting Image of Her Left Wrist Accessorized with Rubber Bands"
One Art: "Sarah Returns to Me as Kirkland Culinary Parchment Paper," "Sarah Returns to Us as a Dwindling Supply of Active Dry Yeast," "Sarah Returns to Me as a 100% Organic Cotton Round," and "Sarah Returns to Us as an Eviscerated Dog Plushie"
Peste: "Sarah Returns to Me in the Form of Questions I Never Got to Ask My Father about Abandonment," "Sarah Returns to Me as a Hairdresser’s Fine Mist Spray Bottle Repurposed for Disinfecting Surfaces with Everclear," "Sarah Returns to Me in the Form of a Ghazal"
Solstice: A Magazine for Diverse Voices: "Ghost Triolet" (Editor’s Choice, 2022 contest)

Dear Ghost,
Copyright © 2023 Donna Spruijt-Metz
Cover art by Gershom
Cover and interior design by Diana Baltag
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or republished without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Harbor Review
Joplin, MO 64870
harborreviewmagazine@gmail.com
www.harbor-review.com

Donna Spruijt-Metz is a poet, a psychology professor, and a recent MacDowell Fellow. Her first career was as a classical flutist. She also translates Dutch poetry to English. Her poetry and translations appear in Copper Nickel, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, the Tahoma Literary Review, the Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks are Slippery Surfaces (Finishing Line Press) and And Haunt the World (a collaboration with Flower Conroy, Ghost City Press). Camille Dungy (Orion Magazine) chose her debut full length General Release from the Beginning of the World (Free Verse Editions, 2023) as one of the 14 Recommended Poetry Collections for Winter 2022. Donna gets restless.
Her website is www.donnasmetz.com.