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by Michelle Brooks
by Michelle Brooks
I
am a room after everyone has left.
Emptied
out, you are free to imagine
anything
could happen. There’s a song
playing,
the sound so faint that you
can’t
tell where it’s coming from
and
the vending machines offer all
the
candies you remember from childhood –
Fifth
Avenue Bars, Milky Ways, Whatchamacallits.
In
front of all this proffered sweetness, you
wonder
if this is what dying feels like. You
buy
a candy bar, sit down on the floor, and surrender
to
the ghosts because it’s all that you can think to do.
Michelle
Brooks has
published a collection of poetry, Make
Yourself Small,
(Backwaters
Press), and a novella, Dead
Girl, Live Boy,
(Storylandia Press). She says she spent
a summer in Gary with a now ex-boyfriend. She says she loves Gary,
even as the boyfriend did not fare as well. A
native Texan, she has spent much of her adult life in Detroit.