Dana Jaye Cadman

Dana Jaye Cadman, Lecturer, Director of Creative Writing at Pace University's Pleasantville campus, holds an MFA in Poetry from Rutgers University Newark. Her creative work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, New England Review, PRISM International, The Moth, The Literary Review, Atlanta Review, and Raleigh Review, among others. Her featured performances include New York Shakespeare Convention, North American Bicentennial Conference, and Colorscape Chenango Arts Festival. Her manuscript ARMAMENTS was a finalist in the 2021 Jake Adam York Prize, Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, and Georgia Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the Metatron Prize for Rising Authors. Her visual art is featured in the upcoming opera Sensorium Ex to debut at Atlanta Opera in 2024. Source

Ghosts

A hallway full of shadeless lamps suddenly goes dark

Upon the simultaneous bursting of the globes.

Glass is everywhere, and so thin it forgets

To reflect even the tiny glimmer of your

Matchlight as you pull out your wish

Cigarette.

This is it. The immediacy of the final desire.

I know the dead I know where ghosts go

to feel at home in the float

And how they commune with the living

through the lightswitch

or the smells of honeysuckles off

the highway upstate

I say

But you don’t

Published:

2022

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Death & Loss

Memory & The Past