Ghost Stories for dVerse Poets Memento Mori Prompt, May 26, 2025

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Ghost Stories

     I look at hubcaps of police cars at the late-night coffee shop. Inside, stool pigeons could be telling on me–fearful secrets from my childhood I’ve been waiting for years for someone to tell and get it over with. The man eating donuts at the counter is my father, spilling wheat out of his pants cuffs after driving fast over dangerous unpaved roads in a pickup that carries stories of his life all over it, but he disappears before I can reach him. The lady with her head in the sack is my sister. I pull it off to find it filled with salt, her eyes hard water oceans washing us away––the family that has ended too soon, lost again in her memory, trying too hard to get out. We are a wasted story.  Over.

No stories survived.
Some folks died away from them,
then the rest forgot.

 

For dVerse Poets, Momento Mori, haibun prompt.

20 thoughts on “Ghost Stories for dVerse Poets Memento Mori Prompt, May 26, 2025”

  9. kim881's avatarkim881

    A haibun full of ghosts, Judy, that really got to me. I suppose, as we grow older, ghosts gather around us. So many powerful images, but this one struck me especially: ‘The lady with her head in the sack is my sister. I pull it off to find it filled with salt, her eyes hard water oceans washing us away’.

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  10. Frewin55's avatarFrewin55

    Your prose section has a nightmarish quality Judy, full of hints of trauma and family history and then your haiku distils the feelings and history into a universal – in the end, all our stories will be forgotten – unless there is a poet or writer in the family to lay them down for posterity…

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