• Skip to content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Painted Bride Quarterly

  • About
    • About PBQ
    • People
  • Issues
    • Current Issue
    • Past Issues
    • Print Annuals
  • Podcast
    • Latest Podcast
    • All Podcasts
  • News & Events
  • Submit
  • Shop
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Prose
  • Contributors
  • Current Issue

Ryan Meyer: “The Mill Where Ghosts Are Made”

November 28, 2018 by PBQ Leave a Comment

Each spring, I visit the mill where ghosts are made.
I first survey the grounds, not to inspect or investigate,
but to frame what I claim to know about existence.
As I make my way through the main room,
an electroplated manor of cool machinery,
I make sure to learn what I can about humanity
in the absolute absence of it. I study the well-groomed
walls, all eggshells and anguish, the full embodiment
of blankness. I keep moving, though, stopping only
to taste with forked tongue the tender flesh,
to stroke the cotton guts that fill the quilted torsos.
I inhabit the emptiness of the place, patch together
small tragedies along a flat line once wrinkled with life.
I want to find the place where the scraps are kept,
where they pile up like beaten chess pieces
in a cobwebbed corner. After a while, I examine the echoes:
the most important—or, essential—employees
toil loiteringly in a mess of heavy paperwork,
while the inessential staff simply loiter. Time passes.
I search the grounds for something sturdy, something
constant, but there’s no good way to manage it, really—
my feelings about it. And so even when I stroll past
the soaring gates to my car, parked illegally across
the street, I feel nothing resembling knowledge, nothing of note,
and the lock on my car door clicks like meaning.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Recent News & Events

PBQ @ AWP!

PBQ Poet’s Publishing Premier: Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures

Issue 100 Has Arrived!

Temporarily Closing Submissions

PBQ presents: Slam Bam Reboot

© 2020 Painted Bride Quarterly. Contact PBQ: info@pbqmag.org