I shouldn’t have listened to that Billy Talent Album. Ever since, I awoke a ghost.
Writing by Featured Writer Shilo Niziolek
Art by Featured Artist Erica Peebus
Resurrection with Punk Rock
I shouldn’t have listened to
that Billy Talent Album
Ever since, I awoke a ghost.
On the road back from the pool
where I float on my back and let
my brain shut off, I try and conjure
the ghost voice into the air.
My brain, a protection spell
placed, won’t do it, refuses to,
each time I try, I swallow another
rock, but I won’t walk out into
the sea with my belly stone-lined.
I can conjure the sounds of all the
others who I ran with, their voices
rough, luminous, a specific vibration,
who are dead or in jail or a million
miles from the person I am now.
Your ghost sits next to me in the
passenger seat, throws back his head
to laugh. It’s in this motion that I know
it’s still there, your voice, the sounds,
they’re too deep in me, like my
autoimmune disorders, inside out.
This is why we don’t listen to Billy Talent.
We don’t play Nickelback. Metallica
is usually okay, but Avenged Sevenfold,
you can forget it. It’s almost October though,
what better time to wake the dead-to-me?
I’ve told you, I’ll say it again, I am
the resurrector. I have many conjuring tools:
a specific album, a Ziploc bag of freckles
collected from light-skinned men, one clear
blue eye, the movie Tristan and Isolde,
the book Here on Earth, the movie Spider-Man,
which we once fucked to against the bathroom
mirror, the film playing in the background,
our eyes latched in the reflection, a never letting go.
I shouldn’t be waking these ghosts.
I shouldn’t be yelling Billy Talent while
driving 50 in a 35. I am bad-boned,
wrong-footed. I am glutinous for the pain.
About the Author
Shilo Niziolek’s (she/her) memoir, FEVER, is out from Querencia Press. Her chapbook, A Thousand Winters In Me, is out from Gasher Press. I Am Not An Erosion: Poems Against Decay, a micro chapbook of collage poetry was part of Ghost City Press’s online summer series 2022. Her work has appeared in Pork Belly Press, Buckman Journal, Juked, The Blood Pudding, Entropy, Oregon Humanities, HerStry, among others, and is forthcoming in West Trade Review, Phoebe Journal, Crab Creek Review, Wishbone Words, Sunday Mornings at the River and Pumpernickel House. Shilo holds an MFA from New England College and is Associate Faculty at Clackamas Community College. She is the co-founder and editor of Scavengers.
About the Artist
Erica Peebus (b.1982) recently moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana from Portland, Oregon where she received her BFA with an emphasis in painting in 2013 from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Erica’s acrylic paintings can be described as both dark and whimsical. Employing a strong illustrative quality, she mixes realism with graphic details. Her works often represent plants, animals, bones, and the human figure exposing her fascination with life and death as well as her love for the natural and super natural world. Her work is heavily influenced by religious symbolism, renaissance paintings, mythology, folklore, and surrealism.
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