Ghosts are like our otherselves in the multiverses grown
from every choice we didn’t select, rapping their knuckles
against the walls of their box, trying to find the obscure door
for another shot back in this world. In Red Hook’s oldest bar,
I sip two fingers for J’s death beside some dock-working Johnny Walkers,
lowballs fixed, as if with rope, to each salt-crusted hand.
They look at me like absinthe, like hallucinogen lurks inside.
I knock my fist against the bar, which causes the man
at the opposite end to shoot his gaze at me, his eyes a flash of green.
The horn’s sinister opening of "St. James Infirmary” drifts
from the speakers and Cab Calloway’s version
in that old Betty Boop cartoon comes to mind.
More than singing, he was known for his dancing, a pallbearer’s 
pitter patter sketched over to make him a ghost,
the animation so lifelike you can almost see the sweat
stacked in gorgeous rings. The hospital never quite told me
who got the donation of J’s green eyes—where they lived,
what they liked to drink. A man 69 years old received restoration of sight.
Tell me. I know nothing of ophthalmology. When fresh retina is braided into
burnt fibers, do the living see through the dead,
the tender wrongs my lover saw overlaid upon the stranger me?
I keep entering boxes, keep knocking.
The man punches my favorite song into the jukebox, starts to tell me
a story about angels and I think, maybe this is the door back.

Published June 28, 2025

Madeleine Mori is a Japanese American writer and editor, born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Common, The Margins, 2022 Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press), Condé Nast Traveler, and Pleiades Magazine. The Founding Poetry Editor at Pigeon Pages, she lives in Brooklyn and is the Assistant Director of the MFA in Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, where she is the faculty advisor to Lumina Journal. She is at work on a poetry collection and a collection of essays.

Harold Edgerton was born in Fremont, Nebraska, and he received a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska. After completing a master's degree in the subject at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1927, he joined the university faculty; he was awarded a PhD in 1931. Between 1933 and 1966, Edgerton applied for forty-five patents for various strobe and electrical engineering devices. He obtained a patent for the stroboscope--a high-powered repeatable flash device--in 1949. His books include Flash! Seeing the Unseen by Ultra High-Speed Photography (1939), Electronic Flash, Strobe (1969), Moments of Vision: The Stroboscopic Revolution in Photography (1979), and Sonar Images (1986). His photographs were exhibited for the first time in 1933, at the Royal Photographic Society in London, and Beaumont Newhall included his work in the first exhibition of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in 1937. Edgerton was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1973. His work was the subject of a retrospective at the International Center of Photography, and he was given ICP's Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1987.