“one night in adam’s haunted rib cage” by princess fernandez

We’re not a new kind of creature. We
go way back and learned to question,

to take, learned to hide, learned to abandon
and refuse its pain. We morph between

your bony boundaries, slip 
through its discomfort into the atmosphere,

swarms of us everywhere. An infestation.
‘Cause we rebooted your Ghost Busters,

disturbed your electromagnetic fields,
make your hairs stand on end, wake you up 

in a cold sweat, believing our existence as disembodied and residual, mere blurry wisps

and darting balls of light.You limit us
to the soft scrapes of a Ouija board.

Rarely do you ever capture us
Class A and full-bodied. Don’t be surprised

to find yourselves horrified by how white &
empty your ribcage is when God releases us.

Author’s Bio: Princess Fernandez is a Pinay writer from San Diego with a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside. Her most recent poetry can be found in Hay(na)ku Anthology 15 and Maganda Magazine #32: INDAK.