THE PHANTOM
There was nothing left to say, and so it moved, empty with purpose,
a thing doused in dusk: the tendon cracked, the shoulder blooming
past the point of brokenness. It would not touch the water. The water
was a face it did not recognize. The face struggled and lost its face
to the details of thirst. There was nothing left to repeat. Not even how
it was named. How it left tidemarks. How it became confession. How
its final memory was the windowpane and how it cradled the sun.
How it saw the curtain, not the wind behind it.
Biographical Statement
Phoebe Pan studies early modern literature at Northwestern University. They are a groundskeeper for the distributed humanities collective, Soupbone, and their collaborative poems have been published in AAWW’s The Margins and The Wrong Biennale.