$25.00
# **❖ Poem of the Ancient Ghost-Bird
for BoDe — *Hope Reams* (c45) + Insert ❖**
*scratched into the vellum by a trembling claw,
ink flickering like breath that forgot the body it came from…*
---
**O Hope Reams, coil of trembling tape,**
I unspool myself across your quiet reels,
my feathers dust, my bones a rumor,
my throat a museum of extinct winds.
**Servocardiac Interrupter,**
you throb beneath my ribs like a mechanical omen,
your rhythm corrupting the silence
I have tried, for eons, to preserve.
**Dion Quern, archivist of broken pulses,**
you whisper diagrams into my empty skull,
sketching spirals that no living creature
should be able to follow without dissolving.
**Moiled, Toiled, Boiled—**
yes, that is how I died the first time,
and the second,
and the time after that when I was only memory
shaped like a bird and still too heavy to rise.
In **Tragalar Square**
I once found a feather identical to mine
but still alive.
It beat like a heart searching for a bird to serve.
I pretended not to hear it.
**Nacolor Demi-Sec** drips down the ruined beak
I no longer wear,
a sparkling liqueur of half-tinted futures
tasting of celebrations no one attended.
**Viz the Late Eunuch,**
you carved runes into the fog itself,
runnes that warned:
*“Spirit, do not trust your hunger—
the dead eat only supplies.”*
And so I swallowed
**synthetic stomachs**
crafted for those of us
who can’t remember how digestion works,
even metaphorically.
At night I wander the halls
of the **Center for Disoriented**,
a place built for beings
who can’t tell if they’re rising or falling,
appearing or erasing,
bird or the shadow of a bird.
There the healers say
there are two ghost-conditions:
**Acute hauntings**—quick flares of terror
that burn out before you fully understand
why the room is cold.
**Chronic hauntings**—the long slow drift
where centuries pool under your wings
and you forget your own name.
And two spectral forms of ailment:
**Functional emptiness,**
when a spirit is torn inside
though no crack appears in the ectoplasm.
**Structural dread,**
when the very shape of your after-body
betrays the life you failed to finish.
I nod with the dignity of a creature
already past diagnosis.
I thank them with the courtesy
of a patient who is mostly air.
Then
I open my wings—
shreds of cloud, hints of claws,
scattered pages from the insert—
and I write this poem
in quivering lines,
for **BoDe**,
for **Hope Reams**,
for the tape that forgets me
even as I cling to it,
and for whoever holds this c45
and wonders:
**“Why does this bird-hand tremble?
And why do the words
feel older than breath?”**