Ghost-Logic: A Cento

20 July 2026

You are crying in the shower. The road we kissed on is gone.

I will never be as I was today. I wanted, for a long time, to be anything,

but the moon is just a young slip of a girl tonight, water now murky as memory,

the sky blushing as if shamed.

It’s ghost-logic: everything absent is open for haunting and I believe I am complex, more than I actually am.

Notes

Lines taken from poems by Ada Limón, Tyree Daye, Sierra DeMulder, Leila Chatti, Roseanna Alice Boswell, Evelyn Berry, and Wo Chan.

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about the author

Kate Kadleck is a writer and relationship therapist based in Dubuque, Iowa. She earned her MS in marriage and family therapy from Northwestern University and is the author of a chapbook, Corpse Pose (Bottlecap Press, 2025). Kate also has a collection of poems, Not Quite Medusa, forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Her work can or will be found in places such as Permafrost, Spirit Lake Review, The Talon Review, Wild Roof Journal, phoebe, Beaver Magazine, Outskirts Literary Journal, and Rust & Moth.

Instagram: @kathrynkadleckburks
Website: katekadleck.com