Everybody's Dead but You Haven't Made 25 by Jacq Roderick Fuck it. There’s ghosts no matter when you decide to turn up. Aunt Wendy’s the latest to return to her haunts. Good run, all of them. I promise you. Ghosts in the photos, spirits beside the babies. Fuck it, at the watering hole, bartender Amanda wishes them luck for purgatory & pours you another. Let her. Where’s the harm in believing? In leaving? Nothing, but remember to visit. Get your cards read & belly fed. Reacquaint yourself with scrap. That’s home, kid— body-dropping land. Zombies littering municipal sidewalks, menthols popsicle their chapped lips. You kiss each weathered cheek. The salt air shares with the cigarette wheeze. You know everybody. Everybody knows. Skeletons shaking bones marketside, wait in line for deli-cuts. Where else? What else. It’s alright that most of it’s gone. What’s meant to last comes back otherwise. Fuck it. Who hasn’t death asked about? Tickling the best of them. And the worst. Funeral home glory be. Meetingplace. Outing. Opiate withdrawal. Etc. Nickel for each dead drunk & you’ll have enough to buy a round. I promise you. Ghosts worth toasting for. Ghosts dancing on their own graves. It’s alright. They’re celebrating you. They’re celebrating. Excerpt from our interview with Jacq Roderick: KARAN “Everybody’s Dead but You Haven’t Made 25” fills the town with company: Aunt Wendy back at her haunts, skeletons in line for deli-cuts, ghosts dancing on their own graves, etc. The poem asks, “Where’s the harm in believing? / In leaving?” — so I’ll hand that back to you. Where’s the harm, and what does believing in ghosts mean to you? JACQ I woke up one cold January morning to be told my estranged mother, halfway across town, did not. I was sixteen; my sister, fifteen. We could count all the other tragic deaths on both hands by that point. What I mean to say is that ghosts have never not been around. And it’s their constant hauntings that urge you to leave a place like Marshvegas, because it’s easy to feel like you’re fading, too, amidst all that senseless grief. The harm in leaving is everywhere. It’s drenched in the post-vomit sweat of “Marshvegas,” it oils the engine in “Trespass.” The minute you leave home, you are always a visitor; rarely a guest. In leaving, you betray your ghosts—you don’t make it to every gathering, you can’t catch up with your cousins as often. And yet leaving is the beginning of living, not just surviving. Structurally, it’s an act of social mobility; I went off to school, and then more school. In these places, you’re just as much a visitor. You don’t fit in because you don’t talk right, because your uncle’s definition of “PhD” is “professional hole digger.” I think I was only able to really get my voice in my work once I let go of the Keatsian emulations. And I love Keats—he’s in the Cockney School of Poets, after all. But it’s easy to fall into thinking you have to write a certain way to be taken seriously—taken as literary. Despite the harms I am grateful for my leaving—my believing. I know my ghosts will always follow me wherever I go. That’s the good thing about them—they stick around. And they help you. They remind you where you come from. I will always be proud of where I come from. I’m indebted to them, the ghosts—just as much as my teachers, my friends, and anyone else I’ve been lucky enough to know or love.
💜”Reacquaint yourself with scrap”