Rehydrating Mushrooms

I’m thinking of how mushrooms will haunt a wet log like bulbous ghosts;
of how a mushroom may be considered a travesty of a flower

in the way that a wolf may be a travesty of a grandmother. Personally, I don’t
believe in ghosts, but it has been three months since a man was shot

in a street just next to where I live, & now it seems the ghosts are everywhere:
in clouds that stay around the fringes of the sky, in a blur in a photograph

when the camera jerked away, in a thumb-print smudge on my glasses-lens.
When I add water the mushrooms swirl like dull confetti. They begin to print

themselves onto the water, their flavour. A week without rain is enough
to set my skin ticking, so when it comes — prefigured by the smell of it

& thunder playing at the edges of earshot — I go out to greet it
in a tracing-paper-thin dress, no tights,

& it falls on my head like a bolt of gauze & in undisclosed locations
bodies seep into the water-table. It is the first Monday of June, 2016.