BY EMMA AYLOR

The spare bedroom was on the second floor, in the oldest part of the farmhouse, paneled in stained poplar. It smelled like dried vanilla and tobacco crushed flat. I stayed in there a few nights each year: every sleep spent, a gray movement shivered at the base of my skull. My brother felt it too. We were asleep next to each other. She had been dead many years. The poplar grain whorled like needle marks stabbed through and dragged along in waves. The wide planks of the floor were fastened with hand-slit nails; their rusting iron toothed at our bare feet. The wind faced west. The people couldn’t move. They’d been dead for two hundred. Some nights I’d smell smoke. We’re asleep together. I dreamed that my tongue had turned black and thick. From the field looking back I could see air move in the window like cloth forever folding over. The shoes in the corner made scraping sounds. Some nights I’d wake with my sweat smell like blood clotted in a heap on the floor. I slept with the lamp on: she never died. I gathered gone textures in my hands like reeds. At night in the shadeless window I saw people moving on top of the dark.

Emma Aylor’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, New Ohio Review, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, and the Cincinnati Review, among other journals, and she received Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She lives in Lubbock, Texas.

Process Note: I grew up in an old farmhouse in rural Virginia. The house had been added to many times over the years, but the upstairs bedroom my family called "the wood room" was from the original structure, built in 1789; my brother and I were certain it was haunted and occasionally heard footsteps or strange noises. I wrote this poem to remember and concretize the specific unease of a room that, as a child, I felt was reserved for the dead.