Notes Toward a Pure Hauntology

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History is perched and crooning –
a vulture’s smirk reflected
in fawn’s blood fifty feet below.

Turning cog! Tuning fork! –
imbibe me; strike me as useful and send me
tumbling toward a more delicious reality.

I have found my kin there –
beneath the pungent forest floor.
Beneath the rot of outdated modes,

we lie in wait for the seventh
seal to be broken; we wait on our bellies
for the space between the notes

to once again reign over the
thunderous colosseum of my car payment
is due in ten days, and I make less than

twelve dollars an hour, and I have
a child and why the fuck should this be so hard?

Europe is teething again.

The lightness of our place has become
the most unbearable tickle. While
wholeness peers ‘round corners at us

like a specter of Marx, shalom crawls
convalescent at our heels but
there is now NO TIME TO REAP –

there is time for no new thing
under the sun, and – in a breath – I have understood:
we are petals on the wet, black pavement.



Tuck Ledbetter (he/him) is a third-year student at East Tennessee State University where he studies English and Linguistics. He will be published in The Mockingbird Literary Journal in 2022. When he isn’t writing, he enjoys playing drums for local jazz groups and hiking on the nearby Appalachian Trail.

NOVUS Literary and
Arts Journal
Lebanon, TN