Emily Dickinson, My Mother’s Ghost, and I Attempt a Roux While Nietzsche Ascends a Crawfish Throne

Emily appears in my kitchen like a thought I didn’t mean to think out loud—
white dress glowing with that eerie, unfinished grammar she carries everywhere,
a small book of Pascal tucked under her arm as if doubt needed a mother.
She hovers by the stove with the tenderness of someone approaching a miracle
and the terror of someone who’s seen what miracles cost.

Then my mother’s ghost comes in through the kitchen grout,
cigarette already lit like she’s been smoking in the afterlife’s break room.
“Baby,” she says to Emily, “you want one?”
Emily blushes—peach-blossom pink—then takes it exactly like communion:
slow, reverent, as if the smoke might be scripture rising to meet her.

My mama’s ghost has always been well-read—
she quotes Baldwin when she’s angry,
Ocati when she’s lonely, and Faulkner when she’s drunk,
which is to say: half the time and then again on Sundays.

Today she’s feeling philosophical.
She taps her cigarette into the sink and says,
“You know, Emily, God’s got a crawfish boil goin’ somewhere.
Big old pot. Bubblin’ over with regrets.”

Emily nods solemnly. I never knew Him well, she says. He rarely visited Amherst.
My mother laughs: “Sweetheart, God avoids Massachusetts
same way He avoids Baton Rouge gamblers.

He only shows up when someone burns the roux.”

Nietzsche materializes behind the toaster, riding a spectral crawfish
like he’s trying out for a bayou-themed apocalypse parade.
He mutters that if God exists, He’s probably hiding inside the Trinity River
disguised as a catfish with a drinking problem.

“Sir, your despair is leaking,” Emily tells him, waving her cigarette

like it’s a punctuation mark capable of exorcism. I hand Emily

the spoon and teach her how to stir. “Emily,” my mother says,

“you read more than any Yankee I ever met, and yet you stir

like a woman who’s never outrun a bad man in a Winn-Dixie parking lot.”
Emily stiffens, then softens, her wrist trembling with that peculiar mixture
of terror and delight reserved for first kisses and metaphysics.

The roux darkens, thickening into the shade of a memory

I inherited but can never quite pronounce. It smells like my childhood kitchen,
like my mother at the stove rehearsing her many escapes without ever leaving

the room. She watches the pot now with a kind of grave affection,
as if it were an old diary she can’t decide whether to burn or read aloud.

Emily leans closer to the steam, whispering almost to herself:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain— yet here—something rises. My mother snorts,
“Baby, everything rises if you heat it long enough—pain, love,
even the things you swore you buried.” Nietzsche tries to interject,

but the wallpaper sweats with heat and old humidity and his words

slide right off it, like philosophy refusing to stick in a room full of women
who’ve already lived harder truths. The lines between us blur—

Emily’s lace sleeve brushing my mother’s ghost-arm,

my hand steadying the pot, the faint trembling of the house
as if our cooking is waking something structural,
something older than language, older than sorrow,
older than the women who taught us how to inherit both.

Emily tastes the roux, her eyes widening in the soft shock of recognition.
I taste—Possibility, she says. My mother places a hand on her back—

light as a blessing, heavy as a debt—and answers,

“Possibility’s just another word for what you survive.”

Emily inhales her cigarette and exhales—not a cathedral, not this time—
but a long, trembling ribbon of smoke that looks a little like belief

learning how to walk. My mother’s ghost pats her back and says,

“Good girl. You’ll fit in just fine down here.” And for once—

even Nietzsche stays quiet as the roux finishes becoming
the one true thing we can all agree on: that God, if He exists,
must be a woman with burnt fingertips and a talent for

stirring darkness into something almost tender.