The Ghost on the Wall

was there above my head
in the kitchen of my family's three-bedroom apartment
in the projects, where the poor lived and died.
Daddy made me practice my handwriting, after dinner,
before I could go out and play the last hour of the day.
He stood behind me, a fist on the landscape, ensuring
that I perfected the loops and angles of the lines,
the way a ballet dancer dazzles the audience with pirouettes,
and always until the feet, calves, ankles ached.
The toaster partially reflected him,
and when he left, I rubbed the length of my arms,
coaxed the pain from my elbow.
Outside, shrieks and trills of laughter,
friends running back and forth
across the open back door, forced my pen down.
They played with me, smushing their lips against the screen,
the way I'd press my spoon into a pile
of mashed potatoes to spread them across the plate.
But my eyes always wandered above my head,
to Daddy's knuckle indentations in the painted brick.
Darius Stewart I looped and angled over and over
until the ache, once more, returned to my arm.
I knew he was there, somewhere in the room,
his presence startling as a face emerging from a fog-covered lake.
The shudder it caused, rippling as a fist pounded into water
expands and diminishes.

--Darius Antwan Stewart