Ghost Friends, Sangamon County, circa 2006 by John McCarthy

From Volume 41, 2014

“It’s so strange to revisit a poem that I published when I was 20 and which is now almost 20 years old. While I most certainly have the urge to revise, I see the artifacts of my own growth. Whether or not I feel close or distant to the actual memoir-narrative of this poem after all this time is irrelevant. For me personally, the conversation with this poem has less to do with what it says about class, familial relationships, or the Midwest, and more to do with self-reflecting on the process of growing publicly as a writer. Is growing publicly something you are comfortable doing? And if you are, then it’s certainly something we should celebrate. You can still find this poem in my first book, Ghost County.”

Remember when you said if
you could, you would extract
your soul, bait it with a hook,
cast it into graves, and raise
the dead? What is that area
between the storm of imagination
and the platitudes of reality?
You said television.
You always had an answer.
How did you disappear
into thick air? You are small
and large like the word bulge,
describing bumps and mountains.
Perfection is always hiding.
I never found you.
Counting to one hundred,
I’ll admit I stopped at fifty.
I was the one not ready.
You told me idealism was the drug
dealer for a weak mind. We
ghosted smoke on hanging bluffs,
lips puffing bloodshot leaves
pulling autumn down
the Sangamon River. Burning
tires from the trailer park,
and the screaming interstate.
Last night it turned to winter
when you left. On the way home,
you got sick and I got sour.
Crows scavenged harvested fields.
Complacency scraped the soil.
At home, I found loneliness
covered in smoke and fog —
my buried driveway, and my father
trying to crush beer cans
against the moon with help
from my headlights. I pushed him
to the ground with fists, and we made
stoned angels in wet snow.
Our laughter evaporating
because it was real.

John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which won the Jake Adam York Prize. His work has appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, and TriQuarterly. John is the Managing Editor of RHINO.