Ghost Tour
In St. Augustine there’s a rumor that in Lilly’s Room
of the Saint Francis Inn a woman looks down from
the window at night. She’s paced the floors of that room
for a century. It’s said that because the man she waited
for didn’t come, she hanged herself from the rafters.
If you know anything about St. Augustine you know
everything is haunted, mostly by women who died
of Yellow Fever. But one died in a cell of the Castillo
after her soldier-lover found her with another man.
She was chained with him to the opposite wall
of the same cell so they could watch each other die.
She wore orange blossom perfume, and to this day
tourists swear they can smell the sweetness of her death.
One night in Cassadaga Marie and I were the only
guests in the hotel. Someone came down the stairs
in the middle of the night, a young woman with red
spiked hair and crucifix tattoo. But instead of Jesus,
Mary was nailed to the cross. In Charleston we walked
through cemeteries, heard a man say the dead walk
at night bent on revenge. He spoke from a wagon pulled
by an old horse taking tourists to places fraught
with the restless spirits of women blackmailed
and betrayed. Said they re-enact their grievances
over the centuries in hotel and church windows.
It’s believed if you throw breadcrumbs under
an old magnolia tree, and if by night the crows
won’t take them a bride still in her veil will
be found in the river. That a girl is not a woman
until she bleeds.
Lenny DellaRocca
Lenny DellaRocca is founding editor and publisher of South Florida Poetry Journal-SoFloPoJo-and publisher/editor of Witchery, a place for Epoems. He has new poems in Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, and forthcoming in Rattle and I-70 Review
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
This poem is so great. It's just so great. I normally read poems like 9 times before I decide but after one read I was like okay yeah let's do this thing. The choice of images and the pacing really compelled me through the whole thing. And of course, I think the commentary on womanhood is really interesting.
I think the weaving of narratives in this poem is really compelling. DellaRocca is able to maintain a lot of different threads because of the bonds they share about the abuse of women by men historically, which resonates a lot with our time now obviously. The use of myth here is also compelling and I think there are a lot of really stunning moments in this poem where a reader is really able to visualize the horror and even maybe for a second find themselves haunting the poem in return.
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
I chose Taylor because the poems I sent seem to fit her aesthetic, or I hoped they would, based on her profile.
Talk to me about the onus/story behind this poem? What inspired you to sit down and write it?
The poem came after one of our visits to St. Augustine, FL. We've been there many times over the years. One time, we stayed at the St. Francis Inn, in Lily's Room just as the poem says. And it's true, everything is haunted in St. Augustines. There probably isn't a building that's not haunted. Even the lighthouse. Certainly the cemetery's are. And the old Spanish fort (Castillo). And the main entrance-out in the street- to St. George Street. Still, it's not like we saw spirits walking down St. George Street. Or did we? We took ghost tours there and in Charleston, S.C. We walked through graveyards in both cities. In Charleston, a man in a horse and wagon took us on a ghost tour and said how the ghosts of women were out for revenge because their lovers and husbands had "blackmailed and betrayed them." He pointed out that on some nights one can see them in the windows of storefronts and schools etc. Cassadaga, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassadaga,_) Florida is a small village of psychics. It has a fascinating history. We stayed at the supposedly haunted Cassadaga Hotel. The manager locked us in for the night. We paid for two readings at a small building across the street where the local mediums set up rooms and tables to hold aura and palm readings etc. We sat in a room where mostly young women waited until called to sit with the next available medium. One woman insisted on seeing a specific Tarot card reader. She's the one with the crucifix with Mary on it in the poem. I made that up, though she did have a tattoo of Jesus on the cross. I thought Mary suited the poem better. Back at the hotel, we heard footsteps coming down the stairs in the middle of the night though the manager had told us we were the only guests in the joint. I wove various threads of these incidents into "Ghost Tour." Initially, the poem was much longer. One of these days I'd like to tackle the subject again and go back to a longer piece and include our ghost tours in Key West and New Orleans.
As someone who is male identified, how do you approach writing topics like this? Or I guess a better way to phrase it was how did you go about writing this with care?
First, all these stories on the ghost tours were mostly about how women were abused by men in some form or another. I don't think the tour guides realized that. Second, I'd like to think of myself as an ally of women in their fight for equality. I saw the beginning of the "Women's Movement" or as it was once called, "Women's Lib" in the 60s- I was a teenager then. So I've long felt strongly about this. As far as going about writing this piece with care, it's not something I was conscious of when writing it. I suppose I'm sensitive to a point on the issues, but a man can't ever really put his feet in a woman's shoes completely, not really. (And not literally). We can try our best.