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HOW TO TELL IF YOU ARE IN A GHOST STORY Elaine Liu
Certain mathematical equations become handy in the waiting room: the circumference of a rosary measured with an intake form, velocity formulas for a salvation still light years away. You call to martyrs and villains, anyone willing to bargain with a ghost draped in fluorescent light. The form asks how much he drinks, and you write occasionally, but an occasion is a birthday, or a Tuesday evening, or paycheck day, or just any ordinary day. You keep buying Cokes from the vending machine, a make-believe wishing well. You try to picture his liver the way it’s drawn in the Alcohol Use Disorder pamphlet, smooth peach turned cobblestone. Instead, you see him laughing at a cookout, beer can crumpling in his fist, foam dazzling his wrist like a pearl bracelet. He was once beautiful. You once believed that meant something. But now his jaundiced eyes float in the dark like two crescent moons dipped in motor oil. When the doctor appears in the doorway, for a moment you suspect she’s transparent, and this is a performance fabricated to keep you from realizing the equation has already been solved. You have been haunting this room forever.
Elaine Liu is a homo sapien who draws inspiration from her experiences living on both sides of the Pacific, often drawing on her experiences as an EMT, hospice worker, ER scribe and aspiring physician. Her poetry has appeared in EPOCH, Tendon, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Bellingham Review and Folio. She is forever grieving the souls lost in Unit 731.