The thing about graveyards is

they’re terrible at holding onto ghosts.

All that marble,

all those careful rows,

the grass clipped neat

like hair before school pictures—

it’s too formal for haunting.

No one died here.

They arrived late,

escorted in polished cars,

wrapped in flowers and silence,

names chiseled into stone

like a forwarding address

for mail that never comes.

The ghosts are busy elsewhere.

They’re back in the kitchen

where the casserole burned

because someone laughed too hard.

They’re in the passenger seat

of a beat-up Honda

on the night the rain came down

faster than the wipers could keep up,

and the song on the radio

never got to finish.

They’re in the hospital hallway

buzzing with fluorescent worry,

in the alley behind the bar

where a joke slipped

into an argument and fell,

in bedrooms at 3 a.m.

where the last words

weren’t the right ones

but time ran out anyway.

If you want to meet a ghost,

don’t bring flowers.

Bring a story.

Go to the crosswalk

where the light changed too soon,

the lake shore

where someone swore the water

would be fine,

the tiny apartment

still holding the shape

of a missing coat on the hook.

Graveyards are memory’s filing cabinets—

tidy, labeled,

quiet as a closed book.

But the real hauntings are dog-eared,

stuck between pages

of the places we lived:

the diner,

the bus stop,

the front porch swing

that creaks when no one’s there.

The dead don’t linger

where we laid their bodies down.

They hang around

where life forgot

to clean up after itself—

in the mess,

in the noise,

in the half-finished sentences

still floating in the air

long after we’ve walked away.