By Robert Castagna

I grew up against  
a backdrop of dissipating smoke 
and chemical dirt along the riverbed. 
The corporation closed 
making a movie set of isolated ghost towns. My mother has a similar story 
about a factory where her father worked and so generation after generation 
ghost worlds are created. 
While I sleep— ghost words come too. Poems fully formed on my lips 
beginnings in words like a locomotive they will run on paper— 
if I just wake up and write. 
At first, I am obsessed with getting 
them down: hieroglyphics, wall paintings  ancient stones— nature’s reclamation. Archetypes that synthesize. 
But now as I try to sleep 
they are left as phantom words— graffiti just out of reach 
in a chemical landscape.