hungry_ghost kerry on a hill in northampton, massachusetts there’s a bakery called hungry ghost bakery. i was entranced by the name and the sign. it seemed poetic, vaguely spooky but harmless. i remember it as a hollow dome, just an oven and a counter, but the other day i looked up pictures online and saw it was actually a white and blue painted cottage with window boxes full of flowers. maybe it was always that way and i had changed it in my memory. i heard somewhere that memories have a kind of mass to them, they take up space in your mind and each time you revisit, you alter them a bit. maybe i never even went inside the bakery. i was spending the summer doing a museum studies program at smith college. i didn’t want to be a curator. i wanted to be a preparator; to learn how to gild frames, how to understand and arrange light. i wanted to build the gallery. we all stayed in a big wooden house and from my window i could see the building where sylvia plath supposedly once taught a class. but life takes unexpected turns and now i respond to the memory of the hungry ghost bakery in a different way and i wonder what those bakers were thinking. hungry ghosts live nearly everywhere, in any cosmology. their bulging stomachs are never full because they have mouths too small to eat, throats too constricted to swallow. their thirst is unquenchable because the water they find is full of salt. they can’t correct what happened in the past, hard as they try. they don’t know what they need or what they want, though all they can do is desire, and so they wander aimlessly–what do i want? is what i crave what i need? they may wear out their welcome, paralyzed by uncertainty. no matter how hungry they are, they’re never full. if they do manage to eat, it burns to swallow. perhaps at one point we are all hungry ghosts. i didn’t expect to become a ghost with never ending hunger and thirst, wanting what i supposedly shouldn’t, haunting my own past. i have to write down the past as it emerges because my memory isn’t so great and i can’t afford to lose anything. 220214 what's it to you? who go blather from