my family has the gift, they tell me, like my aunt who sees their echoes in the staircase of her downtown condo, ascending into purgatory or perdition, does nothing to detour them but prays 

prays for them always, and my cousin who hears them reverberating in quiet passageways of the apartment in which he does not pay rent, like a song played over and over again and sunk into the wallpaper alongside the cigarette smoke 

like my sister who communes with our female ancestors, regularly, who 

at 7, met my father at a carnival in her dreams 

we can go on the greatest ride in the world, he told her, to the most beautiful house you’ve ever seen, but we can never come back 

the next day my mother held the infant me above my father’s casket and waited for him to awaken to pull me into the grave alongside him, but he did not 

and my mother says that over the years she sometimes sees them in the house he bought, in the dark hallway beneath the wood relief of Christ, but has never seen my father or 

claimed to 

and i could have the gift too, if i was open to it, so i wait every night for a knock, 

in front of the quiet, unlocked door to nothingness 

in the one bedroom valley apartment of my mind

and i wait 

and i wait 

and i wait