Silence

Your friends live far away,
scattered across cities and states.
Sometimes you call to say I miss you,
but then silence spins itself out across the wire,
meanings lost behind sighs and half-stories.
Mostly you do not call them, because you are tired,
and it is tiring to miss people
whom you cannot reach,
who live in cities you cannot get to because you are poor and busy,
and when you do have money you spend it on the wrong things,
piles of books, moscato, tourniquets that don’t quite work,
and when you do have time you spend it walking,
thundering at the moon, the trees, the mountain,
practicing what you might say to someone
if they stopped to listen.

You come home from work to find
a box outside your door. You think finally
someone has remembered
that you are alone, far away from anyone
you have ever loved.
You open the box, already surrendering to the safety
of existing in someone else’s mind.
Instead you find fig newtons and a card which reads:
“Smile, God loves you!” It is accompanied by a pamphlet
about Mormonism, and the people in the pamphlet
look happy, like maybe someone loves them
after all, maybe someone knows their name.
But you do not want the love of an invisible man
in the sky. You are tired of invisible men.

You’ve been trying to make new friends,
talking to classmates about cadence and metaphors,
to coworkers about steamed milk and carafes,
to your dog about the mysteries of quantum physics.
You talk talk talk yourself to sleep and dream
of nights spent driving streets of other cities
with friends you no longer know,
music drifting, hair swirling out windows,
hands undulating like otters through the air–
not a word passed between you, not a word
to sully the sound of silence.

Darla Darla Mottram is a student at Marylhurst University. Her poems have recently been featured in Elohi Gadugi Journal and Eunoia Review. Her current hobby is making friends with crows on campus.