My bedroom is full of ghosts and
glow in the dark stars I glued
to the ceiling
when I was fifteen
and in sort-of love with a girl
who smiled a mouth full of metal,
the brackets of her braces alternating
her favourite colours:
pink purple pink purple pink purple.
I exhaled perfect O’s
with a cigarette I stole from some guy at a restaurant
as she took pictures of the wind
swirling over the harbour.
A pint of fireball stowed away
in my breast pocket.
We went drink for drink
in a bathroom stall
and stumbled to the hammock
in the backyard of her mother’s house
to grope each other in the dark.
A month later she left me
for some guy who played lacrosse,
and listened to techno,
who broke her heart in all the right places
better than I ever could.
I wrote a letter:
If you come back I’ll let you shave my head.
This afternoon I drove past her house.
Her glinting ghost in the front yard,
and the blue dress she wore that night
still hiked up around her thighs.
Tyler Bigney was born in 1984. He lives and writes in Nova Scotia, Canada. His poetry and short stories have appeared in Pearl, Poetry New Zealand, Third Wednesday, and The Meadow, among others.