You burned my letters with a small white lighter
You sent me the photographs and ashes
Like inscrutable dead tea leaves
You had carved into your wrist "I am ghost"
A paradox because you were ghost and flesh
I wanted both, but the ghost feared me
Some nights we hung out at the long-abandoned
Michelen on First
Grieving for dead tires, it seemed,
Speaking as if we had abandoned
Everything when everything was left to embrace
We were deliciously morose
As you can be only once
You would read me Sylvia Plath
When there was almost no light left
And I stroked your red hair,
The coldest part of flame...
A permanently disabled writer and composer, Dylan Willoughby was born in London, England, and now lives in Southern California. Dylan has received fellowships from Yaddo and Macdowell, and a scholarship from the West Chester Poetry Conference. He earned an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, where he studied with A.R. Ammons and Robert Morgan. Chester Creek Press has published three letterpress, illustrated chapbooks of his poetry in limited editions, and individual poems have appeared widely in journals in the US and UK, including in Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, CutBank, Denver Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, Salmagundi, The Interpreter’s House (UK), Agenda (UK) and Stand (UK). He records as “Lost in Stars,” and his music has been featured by The Los Angeles Times, Nylon, XLR8R, Impose Magazine (including an essay on the importance of the vinyl LP album), Insomniac, Earmilk, Echoes (NPR), KCRW (NPR) and other venues. Twitter: @lostinstarsband