The Inexperienced Medium Speaks for an Inarticulate, Stupid, Dead Person

BY RICH BOUCHER

I feel like there is a presence in this house.
Did someone die here?
It feels like a heat, a headache heat in my head just now.

I'm getting something more now:
a child, maybe about eighteen or nineteen.
It's female, but for some reason I can't see the face.
She wants me to know that she can't leave this house,
not until someone knows how she died.

She's telling me that she died in the bathroom.
I see something about a large man with a club.
No, it's not a club. It's a bat, a kind of baseball bat.
She wants me to know she was killed by a baseball bat.
She's saying something about aluminum;
she doesn't seem to know how to pronounce aluminum.
She's giving up on trying to pronounce it;
now she's saying it was a metal bat.

Wait, I'm getting something else.

This part is confusing; she's saying that she tripped
on the bat that was on the floor in the bathroom.
And then the bat got angry and animated itself
and it flew in the air and hit her on the side of her head.
She says the large man just watched and did nothing.

I'm getting another message
but she's not making sense to me:
she's telling me that we should look for a sweater;
she wants to know if her sweater is okay.
She says she doesn't want anyone else to have the sweater.

Is there a sweater in this house?
Is it an expensive sweater?

She's telling me she'll kill
anyone who touches that sweater.

A past member of five national poetry slam teams (Worcester, Mass. (x2), Washington, D.C., Wilmington, Del. and Albuquerque, N.M.), Rich has published four chapbooks of poetry and for seven years hosted an open reading and slam in Newark, Delaware. Since moving to Albuquerque in March of 2008, Rich has been performing and writing steadily in the Duke City, and is a regular contributor/editor at localpoetsguild.wordpress.com. Living day to day with physical abnormalities caused by the consumption of Monsanto’s supercorn, Rich is also an educator, adventurer and an unlicensed psychic. Rich’s poems have appeared in Adobe Walls: An Anthology of New Mexico Poetry, Fickle Muses, The Rag, Menagerie, Clutching at Straws, Shot Glass Journal, Mutant Root, The Mas Tequila Review, Borderline, and The Legendary. Hear some of his poems at: http://richboucher.bandcamp.com.