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Text Message
We have, each of us, nothing.
We will give it to each other.
Carolyn Forche, “For the Stranger”
Words on a cell phone screen, abbreviated
Phrases that existed without context
without punctuation omitted in the interest
of time. Communication breaks
down this way, leaves us both
confused, misunderstood when understanding is crucial,
means the difference between
embracing and merely holding, between
trickling rain and a thunderstorm. Having become is not the same
as becoming. u is never the same as you. U spoke 2
a different person, someone less real, someone to whom
2 never carries the same weight as to and too. The medium cannot hold.
The center falls out. In those moments spinning
amidst your lie and my indecision, following the blades
of the broken ceiling fan as it failed
to circle above the bed, the middle collapsed.
Our words fell inward toward a void
created by failed utterances, lost articulations, inflections
that slipped through that space between here and there,
the no man’s land between sent and received.
It is there that we broke down, each of us without
the other knowing. No eyes watched eyes.
Neither saw pupils dilate, witnessed the briefest glance to the left
that might have indicated truth withheld.
Ours was half a language, without
nonverbal cues that would
have told me you were pretending, withholding
direction to guide me among the shadows through which I navigated,
falling backward, falling forward, holding
on to walls that were not
there. I m not who I was I m who I m and I miss u,
the message read, itself
without the motion of verbalization, free floating. Meaningless.
It is here that we lost each other, gave nothing
we did not promise, nothing
we did not have to offer.
A Promise
I will not tire, of your hands, their patient, guiding
touch, of your skin, its wrinkled, weathered
appeal, the volumes it speaks, the stories your body
tells when we lay silent, exploring each other like options. I will
not to allow myself the courtesy of confusion as I lay
naked waiting for silent responses to unasked questions,
tongues we hold for fear of speaking out
of turn. Light will break
through those windows without blinds first,
at the back of the house, then
the morning will slip horizontally in
before we begin to notice. Sleeping,
we will miss how the sun burns
the fog between the woods and us. How
our bodies align themselves like planets in your bed,
how the soles of our feet touch briefly before moving
away. Sometime during the night we came
untangled, retreated to separate
sides of the ocean our silence created.
My dreams unraveled, the silk of a broken spider web spilled
across our dark where you talked to me in your sleep,
drunk with tired from the beauty we created. How
intensely our skin reaches for each other, how gently you
hold the back of my head in your hand and let me
wrap myself around you. There are no moments
we do not fill with our breath. There is no space we do not
collapse in that room, bring racing toward where we move,
rhythmically, holding onto each other like life rafts
for fear the current will take us under, pull us apart,
return us to a place neither is willing to go. Not this time.
April Salzano received her Masters in English from Queen Mary College,
University of London and currently teaches at Penn State University, Shenango Campus. Her
poetry has appeared in Allegheny Review and is forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg.
She spends most of her time raising her two sons, ages 8 and 4.
Email: April Salzano
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