plastic bag

out the car window 
plastic shopping bags 
take refuge 
in the bare-bone 
bushes 

making ghosts trees

do highway spirits
use them like
hotel rooms?

pulled over their
heads like bonnets

my grandmother
always put a plastic
bag over her hair 
when it rained so
that she the water
wouldn't mess up
her perm

her ghosts reaches 
from behind the storm gates

her thin wrists
& red finger nails

some of the ghosts 
tie the bags
around their neck 

inhale until the 
bags get sucked down 
into their lungs

i make myself
new lungs out of them
when my old ones run 
out of air

punctured by red finger nails

she was never gentle

when i was younger
& unpacking groceries 
my mom told me that
you can suffocate

if you're not careful 
with shopping bags

strangling down
a throat

alone on the living
room carpet i tested
the theory

cautiously exploring
the inside
of a shopping bag 

the ceiling light
dull & muted from 
the inside

breathing slow
& measured 

inhabiting ghost skin

crinkling in 
the torrents of passing
tractor trailers

the highway is 
a homeland where they
all feel called to return 

is this my ghost
looking for a bedroom?

shimming & tearing 
themselves around street signs 

the knuckles of trees

i feel myself
becoming one of them 

opaque white flesh

eyes ground in under
the heels of tail lights

under my grandmother's
pink & green church shoes

aimless with their eyes
crushed like grapes

fumbling for each other's

spectral bodies

rustling translucent leaves

we're just finding trees to
hold us

bags around wrists 

my mother bringing in
the groceries & setting
them on the red speckled
kitchen floor

a storm cloud made entirely
of wind 
& our bones swishing outside

open the car window 
i want to pass through

fist of mouth

ghosts growing angry
with not enough room 
to make skeletons of me

so many in one bag

pulling in every direction
we didn't know we had

i want a body of my own

is this possession or 
prayerbook?

eating plastic from
the floor of the living room
when my mother catches me

walmart blue bags
& yellow from giant food mart

i'll let 
the highway have
it's say about me