Grace Lee
Sorry to Hear You Are Living in a Ghost Town
Today as I brushed my ashen teeth, the bathroom mirror whispered something to me.
Envelop me. I tried but the task was much harder than I had anticipated. It kept slithering
away. My mouth full of foam, I fought with the oily surface until the toaster began
calling to me from the other room. Hitherto. I hadn’t remembered having that
conversation. I was exceedingly hungry but the words floated high away from me and
wouldn’t come down. The ceiling joined in, singing a cavernous dirge. Get outta that
spaceship and fight like a man. It upset me to hear it sung so lovingly, it seemed like a
premonition of a childhood photo in which none of the elements are in focus except the
lone crow standing in a pasture off to the side. The mountains in the background are
looking reptilian, the sinuous vapors dangling over them moan and gasp, Don’t you come
back.
Grace Lee was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Currently she lives and works in San Francisco California where she is forced to have two small decorative pumpkins on her desk as recognition of some shared human experience which she cannot fully appreciate.