THE POPE AND THE GHOST IN THE BIKINI

I haunt the house in only a bikini. I run into myself 

in the mirror. It’s been awhile, I say. 

Later, I run into the pope practicing humility in my mirror. 

What are you doing in my bathroom, pope, I ask, but he has taken a vow

of silence. 

His eyes are half closed and his long lashes make shadows 

on his cheeks like spiders. He is very pretty. 

I ask if I can count his lashes. He lifts his robe. His back is rough

water. No, no. I say. That is not what I meant! 

I take the pope’s temperature. He is the only man I have touched 

in 3 units of time – idk if it’s months or years or days or millennia – 

and he is burning up. You are on fire, I say. I will sing you 

a lullaby while you burn. 

The pope groans and rolls away from me, like the earth. Be still, 

pretty pope, or you will get the fire everywhere, I sing.

Because I nurse him back to health, the pope revokes his vow 

of silence. He knows a lot about quantum physics and gardening. 

We have nothing else to do, so we fall in love. There’s gotta be a clause

in your contract with God that allows this exception, I say. 

God is love, he says, and kisses me time and times and half a time 

until my face and neck smell like holy spit. 

He goes down on me and tongues my clit in Latin. I recognize 

all the root words. Etymology! I scream, shaking. 

Liturgy, he says, coming up and kissing me wetly. 

I love the pope, but I don’t REALLY love the pope, not in the way he wants, 

so he, petulant and hurt, becomes a fuck boy. 

He seduces the clocks and the rugs and the wooden spoons and leaves 

everyone crying. 

He blames me for his bad behavior until the day he dies. 

Because I am a ghost, I live beyond the day he dies. It takes all 

my concentration to dig up his vegetable garden and bury him; 

the soil keeps falling and falling through my fingers. 

My mirror self is harder to see now, a soft outline of shimmering light. 

Death makes vampires of us, I say to her. Love does, she says, 

motioning to the window, through which we watch a reanimated pope 

slowly rise from the grave. 

We make a joke about the second coming, my reflection and I, and I 

sharpen the wooden spoon into a stake.