Séance

Hauntings didn’t go with the new occupant’s
gentrification decor
so they brought in a psychic to remove
the ghost
while at the same time
asking her
to prove she belonged.

The ghost tried memories,
but everything falls through a ghost.
She tried violence,
but what are a few rattled pans and broken glasses?
She tried feelings…

…but the only thing a ghost feels is birth,
and there are few things the living hate being reminded of
more than a fresh chance not their own.

“Without identity, we can’t help you cross over.”
Help, when what they were saying was allow;
what they were promising was eviction
to show themselves what they thought was power.
The ghost—I am God, I know all names—was Penelope
in all lives, in all places.

You call them universes. Ghosts call them home.

I couldn’t show Penelope who she was. She had to live it, had to be it. Receive it.
Every sunset seen. Remembrance of kites.
Peppers tasted. Crying spells.
Screaming at demons--demons who lied.
Her first true epiphany. Fresh lettuce and tomatoes grown in pots.
The smile of her nephew. Then her niece.
Her son.
A hammer.
The weight in hand. Building things slight pockets couldn’t buy.
The joy of learning sounds that
gradually became new language.

The ability to say hi
and mean it.

Which is when she saw me,
and knew my name,
but did not speak it,
as we were friends.

She said, “I am lost and no one knows me.”
She said, “I am here but no one sees me.”

The more the psychic medium
tried to be large
inside the bones of Penelope’s longtime home,
the more the heart
of Penelope Grandina
said, “This is bullshit.”

“Prove yourself” is always
just another way to order “Give!”

Things Penelope knew as foolishness fell away:

They had forgotten the heat of passing through suns, the cold loving press of interplanetary dust, what sounded like galactic shrieks but were infinite love songs.

What they knew was white-knuckled hands
around a table
where candles sputtered.
Fear assuaged
by false demands
and cheap lamentations.

Demands that said, “You don’t belong here,” when here
is where Penelope
had always been.

“You sit in my home before it was ever yours,” she wanted to tell them,
but the universal constant of being so over it is
fuck it.
So she headed for the stars.

While the new occupants lived chained to small patches of earth
Penelope, now known and loved, warped out to Mars.

Zig Zag Claybourne, named by Book Riot as one of the “best Black indie sci-fi writers you should be reading,” is a Detroit novelist, essayist, and frequent contributor to anthologies.