Kelly Gray

In the Time of Ghosts, a Folio Reckoning of What is Missing

January 8th, 2026

When Adam Day asked me to guest edit for Action, Spectacle, I immediately knew that I wanted to feature artists working in deep observation of our local community. And because I like thinking about ghosts, I wanted to know what these artists thought of ghosts too. By the time I had received the finished work, each of the submitters had lost something or someone substantial. Friends, marriages, family. Something in their lives was no longer where they expected it to be.

My friends and I talk about this type of thing a lot, we’re all middle-aged folks, it’s what’s on the table. My latest poetry project seeks to warm up the numb and empty spaces left from violence and loss. It is a project about writing, masturbation, and states of heightened observation, but it is also about our sensual relationships with the nonhuman world, including the parts of us that have died while the rest of our body lives on.

Yesterday, ICE agents murdered a woman who was observing the horrific raids on immigrant communities in Minneapolis. The murder was an intentional spectacle, the kind that, if you watch the video, is meant to insert pain into your body and leave you motionless. We tend to contract against pain, and I could feel the collective contraction as one man, operating under the protection of the government, rendered a person missing forever. There is an empty space where Renee Nichole Good should be, as well as all the empty spaces- some child sized, some adult sized- created by ICE’s ongoing blazing terror hunt. A mile away, there is an empty space where George Floyd was murdered, and between the empty space of Renee Nichole Good and George Floyd, there are countless other empty spaces, some of them in homes, some in bodies. You could draw a map of the Trail of Empty Spaces from Minneapolis to where you are sitting, and back again. It is easy to lose your breath these days. You are lucky if you find it again. But we have, because here we are, on the map.

We try to fill the empty spaces, when we can, with flowers, photographs, objects of love. Memorials themselves are fleeting, like the snow that caught the blood from Good’s body. She was a poet. Because she was a poet, and because she was a widow, and because she was a mother, I know she thought about death. I’d like to think she thought about ghosts as well. I’d like to think that somewhere inside of her, she knew people would share her poems after her death, because that is what we are doing when we are artists; we create ghosts of ourselves that will outlive us and continue to communicate to the world we have left behind.

Two weeks before Renee Nichole Good was murdered, a mountain lion was caught on camera outside of my cabin. He walked- I noticed, incredibly confidently- past our cars along the path to our red gate with the broken latch, where he paused, listening. Although I did not know it at the time, I was just around the corner with my dog, in the dark, encouraging the dog to go pee as quickly as possible. In the video, you can see the mountain lion listening. The body does something when we are paying attention. Then slowly, he turned around, his body slinking against the side of my Toyota- my god, he is the length of the Toyota- and then he was reabsorbed into the darkness, into the unseen.

I didn’t watch the video until later in the day, but I did all the things one might do when curious about mountain lions and also curious about not running into one while walking the dog in the dark. Using the footage, I measured the space between his back paw and front paw, I looked for tracks in the mud, I speculated which way he went. The lock was fixed, which is silly, given that the height of the gate would have been nothing for the mountain lion to lazily leap over. I wrote to the local mountain lion conservation project, who knew him- he had a number, a nickname, a life. He had relationships, offspring. He was beautiful. And he scared the shit of out of me. I shouldn’t write that down because I will lose my forest-kid cred with my friends, but it is true. When I walk the same path he walked, I feel the space of him. I can outline him with my hand. There is a mountain lion hole outside my gate, listening to me. And I am listening to him. I think it is ok that I am scared.

Between the mountain lion video capture, and the murder of Renee Nichole Good, right after I received the last submission in this folio, I began my second death-worker training (the first one having been run by QANON folks, which we did not have language for at the time, but I understood these were not my people in deeply important ways). In my first training, I felt like a bird observing a snake. I was intrigued, but I wasn’t making any moves, something wasn’t right. During this new training, which is taking place from the comfort of my bed and my little laptop, I have been visited by my grandmother’s ghost. It is the first time she has come to me since dying in a dementia facility, which used to be the juvenile psychiatric hospital that I was committed to at 15. She died in the same room that I had slept in, in the same corner of the room, with the view of the maple tree, though now it fully obscures the window. During the death worker training, the deathwives said, you might find yourself emotionally moved during this training. I scoffed. Thirty minutes later, I cried for an hour while the ghost of my grandmother climbed in bed with me, and we grieved that I could not tend to her body after she died, as she had tended mine, for so many years.

White supremacy has always wanted you- me, us- to fear the unknown, and for you- me, us- to kill what is unknown. From the urges of apex predators to queerness, when supremacists find the unknown within themselves, they smother it, oppress it, and bring it back dead. Death itself- the great inevitable- has been manipulated to feed capitalists for generations, and now, freakishly, death is being targeted by the longevity movement, which is perhaps the only predictable outcome of white heteronormative beauty standards rubbing up on the purposefully failing healthcare system of America. They have always, always wanted your entire body- the soft plush places of you, for their own means. These bastards are so skinny, and they are so hungry. And through AI, they can reanimate you past your expiration date and put words in your dead mouth. Robotic specters are their future.

But the work of ‘real’ ghosts is the work of the unknown. To not be able to see the entire form, to know that missing spaces can be walked through but not owned, is critical to our humanity. The works contained in this folio sit within the unknown, they embrace the figurative language of the poet, the figurative language of the haunting. The returning, and then the leaving. 

Gage Opdenbrouw paints forgotten family photos where the viewer is invited to decenter the face as an opportunity to engage with the gesture of the body. Light and paint work to create a sense of fading memory. Erika Lutz leads listeners on a soundscape of forests burning- both prescribed and wild-, while friends are lost, and others found. Christie George draws her attention to the death of a cherished friend and the function of ghost stories, while Allegra Wilson and Mahea Campbel use lyric poetry and erasure to explore burial grounds, roads, and hauntings both in the body and beyond. I think of this work collectively not as a haunting, but a claiming of the unknown, the fleeting. It is what makes us alive, it is what we have in common with the dead.