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More Thoughts after Visiting the Closed-Down<br />
West Virginia Penitentiary at Moundsville<br />
ACE BOGGESS<br />
Ghosts the guide discusses like memories—<br />
who’s to say what’s psychic photograph,<br />
what paranormal, spirit orb, ectoplasm, rust?<br />
The dead remember the dead.<br />
The dead hum dirges for themselves,<br />
chant litanies, adding their names to the list.<br />
The state’s impenetrable warehouse<br />
now a shrine to retribution—is it haunted<br />
from more than nine hundred murders,<br />
or what claustrophobia we, free guests,<br />
smuggle into ominous lines of cells?<br />
When the façade of brown so Gothic & vast<br />
comes into view, we focus, fail to notice<br />
the looming Native burial mound<br />
across the street—the one for which this town<br />
was named, why no cartographer instead<br />
inked Prisonton, Consburg, or Murderville<br />
on a map along the Highway of Lost Souls.<br />
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