Naomi Washer is the author of American Girl Doll (Ursus Americanus Press) and the translator from the Spanish of Sebastián Jiménez Galindo’s poetry collection, Experimental Gardening Manual: create your own habitat in thirty-something simple steps (Toad Press). Her essays, poems, and translations have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Asymptote, Sundog Lit, Passages North, Essay Daily, The Boiler, Split Lip Magazine, and other journals. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Studio Faire and Chateau d’Orquevaux in France, and Columbia College Chicago where she earned her MFA in Nonfiction. She lives in Chicago where she is the editor and publisher of Ghost Proposal. More info can be found at www.naomiwasher.com
from PHANTOMS
We gather orange peels in the palms of our hands. We huddle in stairwells, in schoolhalls, to dream.
We believe in other versions of our selves.
Where we roam is not our home but even so we live there; there where the leaves crunch beneath our feet and the doors creak and fall upon their hinges. There where we break in—through the window—with our boots—following this constant home-bound desire.
If there are two kinds of fear, then we are ever fearful that the door we stay out looking for—the red door, falling on its hinges and peeling—will forever elude us, will forever be one state over, there where the other self is kissing his bride and going off to war.