​Max Lasky         Tallahassee         (Colin Callahan)
A Ghost’s Proposal in a Court

You handed her a ring while the rain slanted
then turned aside. She vetted the thing
like a veteran jeweler, eyes dialed in
under the streetlight’s hum as you stood 
against her car in a cul de sac. Who drove 
a nail into your palm? Holding the stone 
upturned in one hand, she appraised the world:
the band was stained, ring head cut of amethyst,
and the rain fell constant, cold like a chorus
to some lame pop song she always sung
now stuck in your head. She thought then
you couldn’t trust, even if you sometimes did
momentarily, sporadically—it was a problem.
When you caught scent of seasalt, fishbait,
you recalled all those summers never coming 
back again, standing near the Broadway Basin--
the same fishing charters, docked in predawn, 
pass through the Manasquan Inlet by daybreak,
the inlet connecting the river to the ocean,
the rough Atlantic. Before she could respond
first light broke low, some gulls flew overhead. 
She wishes you were sober, she said, cleaner 
than sand in glass, warm as the warmest sunrays
straying in through windshield, across the wheel,
and you agreed. Twirling the ring in your hand,
you were half happy she declined and didn’t say
how you read into signs that don’t exist, at least 
to no one except you—the gull swooping low 
from a street pole means more than its cries,
that she’s close, for instance, to being hopeless,
or that you have a chance if you start charting
the right path. And later, wordless on a bench,
you watched a row of people along the seawall,
some casting their lines out, others reeling in, 
and one untangling his from a stranger’s. 
You considered throwing the ring into the water,
you thought of handing it off to someone random, 
of hocking it at the nearest pawn shop just if 
the profit was worth it. She’ll either miss you
or she won’t. And though the view of the ocean 
was wider than the quiet court she grew up on, 
more expansive with the clouds plowing over 
the horizon, the cut up surface glinting
shards of diamond, nothing inside your chest
swelled or opened, nothing broke like a wave
or ebbed, your desire heading in two directions 
like the ships through the inlet, some to harbor, 
others seaward, and you, steady in the middle. ​