Ghost [Warning: Explicit]

[ellajam]

Hi and welcome. I think you have plenty to work with here. Although there is some interesting wording and a strong image or two you may gain from reading around the site about poetic techniques and there's a fun link on the home page to Colin Ward's Poetry Tips.

So, my read: In the first five lines I would have liked a funny image instead of being told the Narrator was funny. Through the first eight lines I still have no idea what the issue is and although race comes through after that, biracial, which I think is what is going on, doesn't come in until the third strophe. I'd like to have known earlier.

"I was seventeen the first time someone called me a nigger." This line sparked my interest because bigotry usually appears earlier, it made me think the Narrator was somehow protected, though now I think it may just be childhood that protected her.

"Then a boy in McDonald’s whispered in my ear that
"Only niggers do that."
I was drinking a milk shake. "
I thought these three lines were very effective, it set the imagination going and brought a strong image.

The whole third strophe I would prefer condensed into a few clear images, it's mostly tell, little show, bring on those poetic devices I mentioned.

"I am a ghost,
Floating over a physical happiness my sheer hands will never be able to grasp."
I might cut "physical" but I love the sheer hands.

I hope my comments help and that you enjoy the site.

As a child,
I relied on being funny to make friends.
My caterpillar eyebrows and middle-parted hair
Made fitting in a ghost in the creaky house of insecurities;
A moving concept, but still dead.

My whole life,
I have felt like a ghost;
Stuck between two worlds and never really existing in either of them.
I was seventeen the first time someone called me a nigger.
We were on the school bus.
That same year, outside of my best friend’s house,
A boy whispered in my ear that "white girls do it better."
Then a boy in McDonald’s whispered in my ear that
"Only niggers do that."
I was drinking a milk shake.

In none of these instances did I stand up for myself.
In none of these instances did I punch their smug faces.
Because I have been conditioned to find it funny.
I have been taught to laugh when my family calls me “Oreo.”
Laugh when my brother’s friends ask if I’m adopted.
Laugh when people at church stare,
Wondering if I am my cousin’s teenage mother
Simply because we are the same color.
My transparency is not funny.
Too dark to really shine
Too white to be a part of the community;
A sister.
“I’m not really black” and “my black half-siblings don’t
Really count as family” but yet
My white half-brother once told me I "came out the wrong color."

I am a ghost,
Floating over a physical happiness my sheer hands will never be able to grasp.
I am a ghost,
Trapped between two worlds but never the best of both.
And the next time I am called an Oreo,
I will most likely laugh it off.
But if you listen closely,
You will hear the moans of a colorless girl
Mourning the life she will never get the chance to live.