Her parents are dead, but her ghost nanny is able to move her consciousness into a memory with her mother (who is dead too.) Flora knows it isn’t real: so tired but cannot sleep. It is for her own safety from the woman who sleeps in the lake. She will drag you away and not look back. In Pollack’s Number 1, the paint, or pain, is black and white scribbles and labyrinth pathways that do not end, only create new beginnings. A small red circular shape on the lower left-hand corner of the canvas, a prize that looks like a rose. The painting instructs all of our ghosts, if you follow my madness, my paths, you too, can caress these petals, smell a sweetness, like a little girl’s smile, fall asleep under a dollhouse. Caress the dead mother’s pale arms, the black hair under water lines, the dark mansion nights, the fogged-up windows and clouds, there will be a rose waiting for you. It’s all worth it, darling, just don’t fall sleep, tuck away into your single bed, feel your hair being caressed, your dead mother in the sea, reaching for you, saying goodnight, bringing flowers through the kitchen door, the painting burned into bits. The meat of life this beating heart, this red bullseye, this drop of blood, alive and dead, black and white and red all over.  

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens (she/her) went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in Iowa where she is landlocked. Her fifth, full length poetry collection, “Pool Parties” is now available from Unsolicited Press. She is also the author of fifteen chapbooks. Some of her work appears in The Pinch, South Broadway Ghost Society, Cleaver, Dream Pop, Slant, Yalobusha Review, and Grist. She is a member of the Iowa City Poetry Council and has a love/hate relationship with horror movies. Find her online at http://jennifermacbainstephens.com/.