M.L. BACH is a poet raised inside a Pittsburgh area personal care home named after a boat. They earned their MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina in 2025, and their work has appeared in Ninth Letter, The Denver Quarterly, Papaya Press's recent anthology Tell Me About The Dream, and elsewhere.
June 7th, 1968
My poet husband, beautiful and naked,
writing furiously in the lamplight.
He tells me to tear the ruin out of him, to leave
it seeping on the blush tiles of our bathroom.
I love him boyishly, the sum of all my organs,
the surrender of the woman-sense my mother
beat into me. What ruin? I ask him, and he turns his doe eyes.
The curve of his neck tilts, he slopes forward, buries
his sweet face in his hands. He starts to cry.
What ruin? my fingers in his thinning hair,
What ruin? on my knees in front of his writing chair,
What ruin? spitting my soft pink heart into his lap.
The Long Hallway
I’m trying to write a poem
about a haunted house—or a
house haunting, of an upbringing
in the heart of a haunted home:
a hallway of a house
with death on one end
and me on the other, watching
each other watch the residents
walk unsteadily in one direction
with their backs to me and their
noses upturned, or their chins tucked
in single-file, shuffled steps.
I’m trying to write a poem
about how scary it was to
be a child
surrounded by the almost-dead,
who all came here to die, who are
all dead now, decades later, who all
died there, were one day alive
and not the next, not by neglect or
abuse or murder or suicide but just
because that’s what happens there:
you die, you live a life outside
of this place, unseen by this place
and you come here,
at the end of your lived life
and you die, and I see it, I saw it.
I stood, colorful with youth, at the end
of that hallway, my little light-up shoes
planted into the slate tile floor, just
a silly, unwanted reminder of childhood,
that long stretch of haunted life
in between them and me with neither
of us reaching out for one another.
June 7th, 1968
My poet husband, beautiful and naked,
writing furiously in the lamplight.
He tells me to tear the ruin out of him, to leave
it seeping on the blush tiles of our bathroom.
I love him boyishly, the sum of all my organs,
the surrender of the woman-sense my mother
beat into me. What ruin? I ask him, and he turns his doe eyes.
The curve of his neck tilts, he slopes forward, buries
his sweet face in his hands. He starts to cry.
What ruin? my fingers in his thinning hair,
What ruin? on my knees in front of his writing chair,
What ruin? spitting my soft pink heart into his lap.
The Long Hallway
I’m trying to write a poem
about a haunted house—or a
house haunting, of an upbringing
in the heart of a haunted home:
a hallway of a house
with death on one end
and me on the other, watching
each other watch the residents
walk unsteadily in one direction
with their backs to me and their
noses upturned, or their chins tucked
in single-file, shuffled steps.
I’m trying to write a poem
about how scary it was to
be a child
surrounded by the almost-dead,
who all came here to die, who are
all dead now, decades later, who all
died there, were one day alive
and not the next, not by neglect or
abuse or murder or suicide but just
because that’s what happens there:
you die, you live a life outside
of this place, unseen by this place
and you come here,
at the end of your lived life
and you die, and I see it, I saw it.
I stood, colorful with youth, at the end
of that hallway, my little light-up shoes
planted into the slate tile floor, just
a silly, unwanted reminder of childhood,
that long stretch of haunted life
in between them and me with neither
of us reaching out for one another.
Volume 16.1, winter 26
m.l. Bach
