Five Poems

Last summer, moving away from Madison, Wisconsin for the second time, I decided to get a tattoo. My close friend Brooke, who I met ten years ago on Willy Street as co-op cashiers, agreed to do it for me: three dairy cows lounging in the grass in front of a bright red silo and barn. I chose to move to Wisconsin for college in 2009 because of all my dreamy childhood memories up at my grandparents' dairy farm. The barn cats, Lassie dog, dirt roads, jelly pancakes, tractor rides, collecting eggs​​—even the manure smell was sweet. 

My Wisconsin experience ended up being more like… well, these poems I wrote for The Atlas. I didn't write very much my first time in Madison: mostly tweets, a few blog posts, and some erasures made out of a tiny book of fireside chats. It was important to me to honor that, and to include a found poem and a tweet poem. I wanted to make my 20s sound glamorous and worth it, but I also wanted the beloved version of Madison presented here to feel a little dark. Haunting was a fitting theme, then, especially because I wrote these poems while floating around my little summer sublet by the lake. 

FOUND POEM USING TWEETS WRITTEN THE FIRST SUMMER I LIVED IN MADISON, WISCONSIN

I LIVE IN MADISON NOW, OK! New home, new job, new town.

My skirt was too short for work today. Ever so slowly, I’m adjusting

to post-school life. Post-grad, post-bra. A profound existential moment

while waiting for the bus and listening to Man in the Mirror. Am I

reinventing myself without knowing it? I want to make a Missed Connections

post on Craigslist for the black girl with natural hair & orange lipstick

who's always on my bus. Last night, I scooped ice cream for four

BEAUTIFUL firefighters who were on their way back from fighting fire.

A little girl got a chocolate-dipped sugar cone of cherry Italian ice

topped with sprinkles and gummy worms. The oldies station

did a countdown of the Top 5 Pop Songs About Driving in Cars.

Ah, summertime in a Badger Cab. Spitting cherry seeds into Mendota.

Bike rides in thunderstorms, beer, puppet parade of the species

led by a giant Darwin. Solstice fest, where I saw

the best minds of my generation wearing acid wash

and marijuana print jean shorts. I spent all my tattoo money

on an air conditioner. As I was running to catch my bus

a beautiful, bearded man on a bike waived down the driver for me:

Good morning, Madison, I love you, too. I am in my “twenties” now,

and I treat my electronics and accessories well. It's 2013 and

the dead duck floating in the lake is really killing my buzz.

I am about to find out who killed Laura Palmer. Two dollar

gin & tonics I regret nothing.

DICK CHENEY WENT TO SCHOOL HERE

Dick Cheney went to school here, and I swear I still see him. Often,

he ruins my good mood: For weeks straight I’m content but then

I see Dick Cheney’s ghost slip into the bar bathroom. I see his white hand

sticking out the window of a passing car. He cuts in front of me in line

at the co-op. Last week, I wanted to lay out by the lake and there he was,

in his hammock, peacefully rocking back and forth in the world

he helped create. It didn’t seem fair. I couldn’t share the sun with him.

I headed back indoors. When Dick Cheney went to the University of Wisconsin,

he had maturity beyond that of the typical graduate student.

What that means, I think, is that Dick Cheney did not protest

the Vietnam War. He wore a suit to class. Dick Cheney isn’t dead yet,

but I feel his ghost here.

FOUND POEM USING GHOST STORIES FROM THE MADISON, WI SUBREDDIT

If you’re looking for a place to investigate, start with Sanitorium Hill. Remember:

it was a tuberculosis hospital and not an “insane asylum,” which a lot of people

have some kind of horror movie fascination with.

If you are near any of the lakes on an early winter’s night when it is super cold and the air

is very still, you can sometimes hear loud ice cracks or ice crystals tinkling

as the thin sheet of ice forms.

Picture it; Madison, 1994. Grunge was in full swing, we all had low-paying, fun jobs. My friends were living in a house that was about to be condemned. We were drinking and partying in the basement and I kept feeling something brushing my shoulder. It was an OLD ASS house

and I kept worrying that it was a centipede or something. I kept brushing it away. We decided to go out and I was the last up the stairs.

On the way up I was touching the rubble foundation and said to my boyfriend, Why are there so many skulls in the foundation? Something brushed my shoulder again, this time a little harder.

That's when they told me the previous tenant had hung himself in the basement. Also, I was tripping absolute balls.

Oh, I have one. Lake & Langdon. Top floor. Summer ‘87. While lying in bed,

reading or watching TV, I don’t remember, the bed slowl, gently moved

across the floor about 18 inches.

One slow, steady motion.

People have seen Confederate Soldiers at Camp Randall, which was a Civil War POW camp

that had to be closed because the conditions were deemed unsuitable. The Confederate prisoners

kept dying.

I live in an apartment and we’re pretty sure we have a ghost cat.

I live downtown, too. I think I have a ghost—I think we came to terms with each other,

and know we’re okay with each other.

We're swallowed by complete darkness, and we listen.

I had a single room on the South side where a weird ass swing set outside was
always creaking creepily in the wind.

I woke because it felt like someone had clamped their hand down hard and fast

on my upper right thigh. Normally, I would have brushed it off as a bad dream, but now

I was wide awake, the stupid swing creaking creepily and staring down at my leg

because even though I was clearly alone in my room, I could still feel the hand gripping

my thigh, five fingers and a thumb squeezing firmly. It didn't feel threatening, just urgent.

I took a deep breath and firmly said, You need to knock that off right now! After that,

the swing still creaked in the wind, but it no longer sounded creepy to me.

My mom would go into work on Saturday morning occasionally. I would wander

through the building. There was always the sensation of being watched. It made me

uneasy. In the basement there was the cafeteria. I found out later that’s where

the morgue was. It was cold and I was scared to go down to the vending machines.

The whole place feels creepy, but in a homey way.

There have been a few times when I'm doing something in my kitchen, and it feels like

someone has their hand on my lower back, like you would do to a significant other

cooking at the stove.

I heard this year of someone seeing the ghost of a Confederate solider

at the old Rayovac plant on Winnebago Street and they thought it was crazy

because why would a Confederate spirit be in Wisconsin?

There were many moments in which I felt an overwhelming feeling. It was as if

someone broke some terrible news to me.

I don't believe in ghosts, but it’s a very old building that must have seen many deaths,

with lots of 19th century pictures on the walls. You could easily imagine those people

haunt the place.

I had a patient pass away in one of those rooms, holding my hand. The next time
I was assigned that room, something squeezed my hand again.

My dad always thought someone was watching him from a room off the garage.

One time, he thought an unexplained light in the sky followed him all the way from Baraboo

to the house. Then again, he was known to drink a little.

This is the kind of place that you really can’t feed your negative energy into, it will definitely manifest and be used against you.

Hoyt Park at night, in the fall.

My friend lived a block down the street, it was my freshman and her sophomore year. We were

so afraid.

You’d think with all the water around it would be way more active. Madison actually

has a lot of light and that’s beautiful.

Members of the Sac and Fox were slaughtered on the isthmus

during the 1832 Black Hawk War. Elders who had given up were killed

by Henry Dodge’s militia on the grounds of today’s capitol. Dodge was a slave owner

and became the 1st governor—lots of hexes dropped on his name and our state

by his escaped slaves and massacred native communities.

One night I was biking on the northern roads bike path in Verona, when I heard

pounding footsteps come up behind me.

At the back of the cemetery, we heard a larger black animal thing. I tried approaching

it but could not find it, which is strange because it was only a few feet away.

My uncle was a night janitor at in the old science hall building. One snowy night,

he went to the basement using the elevator and entered a room where this shadow woman

was in the middle of the room looking down on the floor.

UW, late 1980’s. A professor was going to the libraries and somehow taking off

girls’ shoes without them even knowing it. They’d get up to leave and realize

they were shoeless.

A lot of people are unsettled when they find out there is a nuclear reactor on campus

that uses weapons grade uranium. Can’t verify if it’s haunted, though I stood over
the reactor on a boy scout trip. It was very cool.

Ouija board correctly predicted what number my brother would pick, four times in a row.

Baby toys making noise without anyone in the room.

Built on old Native American effigy mounds…

Otherwise, pretty mundane. 

I SEE OTIS REDDING’S GHOST ON THE BIKE PATH

but as I get closer, I see the shape I thought was a body

is only a tree, a trick of the light—nobody to tell me how

to fix my life. No wisdom for me here, at the corner where the branch

reaches out for the street sign.

GHOST STORY 

Can I tell you the story of the first summer I lived in Madison?

I was in constant culture shock. The first apartment I got, I got

when the previous tenant decided he could no longer stand to sleep

in the bedroom where his girlfriend had died. He moved out,

I moved in. First floor. At night when I went out to smoke,

my cat came out too. She never went further than my eyesight.

Sometimes I didn’t see another black person for a full week.

I had never experienced storms like the one that tore down

the storage units across the street. The apartment never felt haunted

by the girlfriend, but I behaved as if I was possessed, and I was—

I was twenty-two. I considered myself an academic, a historian,

someone who might change the world. I reeked of undergraduate

naivete and I never wore a helmet. The bruises on my legs shifted like ghosts,

a new shape, a new shade of purple every morning. I still

remember the time my friend invited me over and paused

the episode of Game of Thrones to tell me that my feet smelled

really bad. Taking care of myself was boring. I learned

so much that summer: how to pack a bowl while driving, how to drive

with my knees, how to pop a hole in the back of a PBR can so it drank

smoother. I learnt one-night stands, real hangovers, life without

a microwave. I wanted to see a black person so bad

I visited the grave of one of Sally Hemmings’ sons, buried

on the West Side. Somehow, we had both ended up in Wisconsin

by choice. Ten summers later and we’re both still here.