ISSUE: Spring 1998
We haven’t spoken in so long.
I had forgotten how to talk
and now I practice in my sleep.
I surge with speech.
For all those years, you see,
it wasn’t a matter of words.
Of words I had plenty
and scattered like confetti.
Words sprang from the
anxious sweat of my skin,
buzzed in the heated circuits
of my brain. Words buried
me in strange terrain.
And I forgot whatever it was,
once, in an empty room,
I was desperate to tell you,
before the slow, insidious
journey away.
