The mother carved me from soap, the kitchen knife  

skipping twice on my clavicle before finding  

its confession.                     I emerged already  

dissolving—each fingertip pre-worn to suggestion,  

my face that thumbprint darkness  

where features wait to be accused.

She taught me the art of perfect stillness,  

how to become wallpaper at dinner parties,  

my rice-paper skin transparent under chandelier light.  

Guests would lean close, exhale their wine-rot  

onto my cheek and murmur such beautiful manners,  

barely even there. I studied vanishing  

into brocade, synchronized my breathing  

to the grandfather clock until time forgot me too.

At sixteen, I perfected furniture so completely  

that moths started laying eggs in my hair.  

The exterminator said sometimes girls become  

their own haunted houses—all those rooms  

they never enter, doors they nail shut  

from the inside. He invoiced my parents  

for “one gui manifestation, moderate severity.”  

They paid in joss paper.

In the supermarket, I watch a child  

performing what her mother calls tantrum  

but I recognize as exorcism:  

all that gorgeous fury spilling onto linoleum,  

small fists hammering the floor  

like she’s trying to wake her shen  

from where it’s been buried. Her mother says  

we don’t make scenes 

and I want to tell her:  

the scene is already made—we’re just  

the ghosts who forgot to leave the stage.

Now I practice taking up space—  

knock over pyramids of canned tomatoes,  

abandon my cart diagonal across aisles,  

sing funeral hymns in frozen foods.  

The security guard asks me to leave  

and I tell him I’m already gone, have been gone  

since age seven when I learned to fold myself  

into paper money, burn myself as offering  

to gods who never asked for me.

Even now, gorged on all this trying and noise,  

I’m translucent at certain angles.  

Sometimes my boyfriend reaches straight through me  

for the salt. Sometimes I wake to find  

I’ve left no impression on the sheets,  

the bed still hospital-cornered beneath me  

like a meditation no one remembers saying.

Tradition holds that gui—unsettled spirits—suffer two passings:  

one at the body, another in forgetting.  

But what do you call someone who was never born,  

who spent their whole life practicing  

for their own haunting? Even full of love,  

all a ghost can do is what the living  

taught them: hover at the edge of photographs,  

rattle the dishes just enough  

to be dismissed as wind.