The Ghost’s Maid

She says
she didn’t do it.

Her wrists are slim
and breakable,
her chest concave
and trembling:

she lives in a haunted house

for a while.
No body stays long
in a house like that unless

they are haunted
or haunting and
she is busy
sliding drawers back
into place she is busy
straightening the crooked
catastrophe the ghost delights in.

At night, she hides,
the quilt her grandmother
stitched when she was a baby
held over her face like a cheerful
shroud;
she listens to the crash
of the mess
she will clean

the next morning
and with care she ripens
the house for its next haunting:

serves the afternoon sun swept,
polished floors, righted wood drawers,
books and papers in orderly stacks.

Her mother does not believe
in hauntings; her mother loathes mis
placed
things; her mother has a finger
pointed and cruel like a spade
it digs between
her ribs she can’t

breathe

in haunted houses she runs

to the trees they begin in the backyard
they never end, they stretch clear past
the hazy horizon she spies from her perch
on top of an old fat oak.

The bark bites her legs
clambering down,
and a cactus below
jabs her tender thigh backs

so she hooks her ankle around her head,

she is a wolf: she tears cactus prickles
with her teeth and spits on her raw skin
until blood pinks
in submission
and the tall grass dances whispers
and the snakes politely rattle
and even the minnows in the cold,
trickling creek bed
bubble the truth:

She’s not haunted
or haunting
she’s misplaced
and bleeding
and she can’t sweep
dirt floors
clean.