Michael Beard
Poetry
Michael Beard (he/him/his) currently studies poetry at the Bowling Green State University MFA program and serves as the managing editor for Mid-American Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, Anti-Heroin Chic, Moon City Review, the lickety~split, and other places. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram @themichaelbeard.
Mute Ghost of Your Grandfather
at the road’s edge, stepping along ghost asphalt and ghost dirt,
ghost blue handkerchief in his back pocket, listening to ghost
robins twining autumn thin, the ghost-lit moon, ghost memory
of a boy who loved him, you the boy, sitting in a ghost field,
ghost rain beating into you the blue ghost of longing, how the
dead touch everything away.
“ I wrote ‘Mute Ghost of Your Grandfather’ a couple weeks after my grandfather’s would-be 89th birthday this past September. Reflecting on who he was as a person and how his death affected me, I feel this poem is something my younger self needed to get out. ”