Like the heron I hunker in the tall reeds, my past lives bunched over my shoulder like a worn blue petticoat.
Writing by Featured Writer Shilo Niziolek
Art by Featured Artist Erica Peebus
The Feminine Urge to be a Ghost Haunting a Marshy Landscape
Like the heron I hunker
in the tall reeds.
My past lives bunched
over my shoulder like
a worn blue petticoat
And still;
you do not see me.
You only feel the whisper
behind you, the shadow
of my hips.
A glimpse of me round
the bend of the river.
But when you turn,
only cattails in the wind
only percussion.
I’m the silence that
keeps you up at night.
When you step into pluff mud,
hushed and barely breathing—
still I do not show myself—
I am only and everything
that haunts you.
My image always just
in the corner of your eye,
sleep or sand or pollen collected.
If I have to die a thousand times,
I’ll do it, I’ll die a thousand more.
I am more bird than woman
anymore anyways, hollow
bones, hollow ghost, all flight.
And when you turn your back,
a splash in the water as dusk descends.
A sound remarkably like your name
but where you search, only
smoke and air surround you.
Only the heron stalking.
Strange creature with hazel eyes.
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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