Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the poetry collection Dear Weather Ghost and the chapbook Arbor. Her novel, Sunset City, will be published by Ecco Books in April 2016. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Denver Quarterly, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, and other magazines. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
Sirens
If the door is hot
If the door is cold
If I am the person behind my eyes
If sirens and churches, if vapors
If the wood stepped back to make a road
And
I was not my body
I was not my thoughts
I was not—
The wail won’t stop—
A road smothers beneath
every street