Spoken Word Poetry Compilation

Entry #47

"The Cry"

A man can cry, all night, your back shaking against me as your mother sleeps, hooked to the drip to clear her kidneys from their muck of sleeping pills. Each one white as the snapper’s belly I once watched a man gut by the ice bins in his truck, its last bubbling grunt cleaved in two with a knife.

The way my uncle’s rabbit growled in its cage, screamed so like a child that when I woke the night a fox chewed through the wires to reach it, I thought it was my own voice frozen in the yard.

And then the fox, trapped later by a neighbor, who thrashed and barked, as did the crows that came for its eyes: the sound of one animal’s pain setting off a chain in so many others, until each cry dissolves into the next grown louder.

Even if I were blind I would know night by the noise it made: our groaning bed, the mewling staircase, drapes that scrape against glass panes behind which stars rise, blue and silent.

But not even the stars are silent: their pale waves echo through space, the way my father’s disappointment sags at my cheek, and his brother’s anger whitens his temple.

And these are your mother’s shoulders shaking in my arms tonight, her thin breath that drags at our window where coyotes cry: one calling to the next calling to the next, their tender throats tipped back to the sky.

- Paisley Rekdal