Member-only story
Poetry
To sit up straight
in a dark bedroom
and sip the sound
of midnight.
To taste it.
Absorb the silence like
a nutrient for the skin,
for the stricken one inside
who’s starving for stillness,
and nothing happening,
nothing requiring response,
especially correct response.
Just us breathing here.
Me, the bed, the muted outlines
of this room lit only by muffled moonlight
and streetlamp insisting
through the blinds.
This quiet has a sound.
It has a name,
a frequency.
A presence.
Like being underwater
without the water.
Like feeling the pulse of
pressure against the
ears of the heart.
I cock my ear. My tastebuds reach
in the cave of my mouth for
the deep red wine of this quiet.
And then I begin to feel it —
the secret link
between
me
and everything I’ll never know
here in the dark
at midnight.
