by David Galloway

My daughter haunts the house like
a quiet poltergeist, moving through rooms
leaving markers that she’s been there.
When her brother falls asleep she discards
her bed for his, and begins her work.

We find him, hair smeared with vaseline,
trash can upended, a million used kleenex flooding
the floor, recycling containers strewn
in the kitchen, as if a spirit had sought
the emptiness in each milk carton.

Her magnum opus: stealing the purple scissors
trimming both her hair and his
but neatly placing shorn locks in the trash can
and returning the scissors to their place so
it took us three days to discover the crime.

Then she perches, supine, on the mound of bedclothes,
divested of the encumbrances of clothing and diapers,
sometimes with her brother’s stolen pillow under her,
signature thumb in mouth,
tasks completed until the dawn.

David Galloway is a writer and college professor of Russian. Born and raised in Maryland, for the past twenty-five years he has lived in upstate New York. His poetry and essays have most recently appeared in Watershed Review, Chiron Review, Atlanta Review, and The Remembered Arts Journal.