Feeding Ghosts
an excerpt from Colleen Shoshana McKee's forthcoming book from Be About It Press
Feeding Ghosts
1.
Nights on the porch in Missouri, lemonade in the humid darkness, idle talk, my mother’s voice--& the sudden kamikaze buzz of hundreds of June bugs hurling themselves at our screen door, the porchlight, bouncing off my cheek, entangling themselves in my hair, moshing toward the light, falling horribly, exoskeletons scuttling on the porch! How they’d lie there, some legs jittering, the other half of the body still. I’d hover over them, a nervous child, wondering, had they killed themselves just to break into our trailer? Why? It didn’t look like they tried to eat anything inside. They’d just stagger around on our linoleum floor.
I read today that scientists do not know why moths and some beetles dive into light. They used to think the light waves in candles reminded male insects of sexy female bug pheromones. But they’re not so similar. Scientists also believed moths and beetles were attracted to little lights, confusing them with the moon, that they were using the moon to circumnavigate this lonely planet. But insects don’t follow the moon, it turns out. All theories have been disproved, and now we have no theory.
2.
All I have are ghosts stage diving my heart, photo bombing my dreams, assigning themselves leading roles.
In this dream, you eat my jewelry, a hungry ghost popping glass brooches into your mouth, swallowing them whole.
In this one, and hundreds like it, you sit in my bed and hold my hand and talk to me all night, so happy just to be talking to me.
In this one, you kiss me again, slowly, the way you always kissed me.
In this dream, you show up at my job and give away sandwiches from Wexler’s Deli to my homeless students. Corned beef on rye, my favorite. You say, “You take one too.”
In this dream, you refuse to take care of our six-year-old daughter; I’m livid (and surprised to wake up without a daughter or you).
In this dream, you hold my hands in a bar with red lights and cut my fingers with a knife. I let you.
In this dream, and dozens like it, night after night, you visit my beautiful corner, the altar on my dresser, the beeswax candles I lit for you. You cup your big, swollen, tattooed hands around the candles and look at them. You don’t speak to me, you don’t even look at me, but I know you’re glad I lit the candles for you. They feed you. I watch you from my bed, the bed we shared. You’re still the tall, handsome Sephardi in your long black jacket and baggy black pants, something like a smile as you surround the flame with your hands. I know the light has brought you.
3.
I feel like those June bugs back home hurling themselves at the house at night. If they got inside, they wanted out. I never knew if they had bad aim or if they were just throwing themselves around without direction, pure broken impulse. Were they nihilists? Or just defective creatures? Do they succeed at anything? Or is their whole life shooting arrows in the dark, the arrows being them, the darkness being them?
I am a June bug, slutty in grief, aiming myself in the general direction of what might be a door.
4.
Some say, if you see a moth, it’s a ghost visiting.
My family was popular with ghosts.
A great brown tremulous cloud of them,
a force of spiritual weather,
would cluster at our naked yellow porchlight
in the woods. Oak brown and bark gray,
sylvan shimmer, carefully
folding and unfolding
themselves, hesitant prayers,
habitually rereading
the books of themselves.
They’d hover like astronauts, trying
to pick out a place for themselves
on this fluorescent,
overcrowded moon.
My grandma, a kind insomniac,
read and sketched all night
under the kitchen lightbulb,
encased in a glass littered with moths
dead, alive, dancing
on the dead, desperate
to launch themselves
back into the light. Grandma too
was preoccupied with ghosts.
She painted them, wrote them
and they remembered her.
In dreams they would help her
find things, like her Passover plate
which, Great Grandma Rose
pointed out, scolding in Yiddish,
was somehow buried in a pile of old sheets
in my teenage uncle’s bedroom.
My dreams too have been riddled
with ghosts, night after night.
They lead me by the hand
into disordered places.
My great-grandparents feed me
lemonade and cake in the sun.
One dead lover takes me to bed
just to hold my hand and talk,
mainly about books.
A few dead friends
show me around an underground bar
lit with red lights and broken glass.
This, they explain, is where
they live now. I shouldn’t
be afraid here, they tell me.
There is enough light.
5.
Why do we light candles?
To draw the dead to us like moths.
Light the match and watch them
spin again one creature
drowning in the honey of another…
In the ash sticky mess of my heart
ghosts are stuck
like insects in amber.
No, ghosts swim in and flit out again.
They’re the strong ones, the free ones.
I’m the one who stays.
6.
Some say, moths are ghosts visiting
speaking the almost
silent language of the dead.
Their wings are pulpy paper
faintly marked with obscure script.
They stand inches from you
for hours opening and closing
their tiny tenuous wings.
Do we read the language of the lepidoptera?
Do we only worry about our wool sweaters?
It’s a small price
to feed the dead.
7.
Once my phone wasn’t working,
hadn’t for days, just a gray, flat
implacable surface.
One afternoon on the train
in the tunnel under the Bay,
I pried it open carefully,
removed the square
battery. A moth flew out.
What did she think
hovering over the aisle
of the train underwater?
I put the phone back together.
It worked.
But I worried about the moth.
Would she see the sun again?
Would she need the moon or just
lights swishing by
in darkness underwater?
Colleen Shoshana McKee comes from the wild hills of Missouri but has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for fourteen years. Her newest book, Feeding Ghosts, is forthcoming from Be About It Press. She is the author of six earlier books: My Hot Little Tomato (Cherry Pie Press); Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak About Health Care in America (PenUltimate Press); A Partial List of Things I Have Done for Money (JKP); Nine Kinds of Wrong (JKP); The Kingdom of Roly Polys (Pedestrian Press); and Routine Bloodwork, which was a finalist for the Charlotte Mew Award from Headmistress Press. Colleen Shoshana teaches English to immigrants.
Pre-order Feeding Ghosts today. Books will ship out in April, 2026.
