by Keith Dunlap

What is it that is left behind
to remind us of what occupied this place?
Cracked plaster, broken glass, and peeling paint,
a colorless industrial gray mottled
by grime, mold, moisture, and decay,
so that there is no sign, no trace
of order sanitarily imposed
on the once defiant exiles of the human race.
The rubble of a roof caved–in by its own sodden weight,
and a quiet and an emptiness large enough to contain
the numberless incommensurable souls.
No matter what complaints or wretched laughter
used to resound within these semi–solid walls;
no matter what singular thoughts used to echo
within the chambers of the inmate’s brains,
at the end of a life of secrets it is the silence that remains,
and shafts of stale penetrating light that expose
a discarded mop handle and a piece of garden hose.

by Kathleen Ellis

In this place where the wind

from the sun gives way to the wind

from the stars

the Earth waits for its guests

to return to her

to lie on her sandy beaches

to summit her peaks

to speak her 6,900 languages

to master just one

to make up for lost time

to beg the question

to accept the kindness of strangers

recalling the few times

you have paused

before you leaped through air,

knowing whatever

boundaries you push, you are drawn

back to the earth you live on.

by Kathleen Ellis

To sing, was singing, the lowest note
in the universe, too low for humans
to hear, 57 octaves below middle C.
Is there a score for the longest note
in the universe?
                       For the human voice
as it struggles to listen to the energy
its notes carry and never reach us?

Is there a song in all its voices
whose original has vanished
as sound waves oscillating out
from the B–f lat edge
                                of a black hole?

The sound is my breath
escaping the human galaxy.

by Peter Schireson

I watched my brother ailing,
kneeling in a soundproof room
mistaking himself for the devil,
and the silence clinched me to him
and I felt
as though the dead were watching him with me,
and when I scattered his ashes
under the oak at the edge of a broad rolling field
that Fall, a breeze spun up from the south
and the dry oak leaves applauded.
The dead were enjoying the afternoon.
At my father’s funeral, an arc of mourners
dressed in gray knelt by his graveside and prayed
and sang his name in their native language,
which I could not understand, then sobbing
climbed down in his grave, as though the dead
had invited them into the earth, one by one.
I sense they have something urgent to tell me.
In the museum, a Neanderthal woman’s head
in a case shouted at me through the glass,
thrusted her jaw, a grimace, a message.
Some mornings I awaken and feel
they’ve staked a claim on my day.
Nothing goes right.
I call–in sick, and I drink.
Mistake follows mistake
so that I dread
even the sea as though the dead
command the barges spewing crude
from beginning–less time, the living
barely afloat, adrift in skiffs & bobbing
on rafts in oily chop between the shipping lanes.
Now I dream only of flying,
wanting to reach my mother
before she dies, as though the dead
are competing with me
for her company.
There was a time when I refused to fly.
Leave the crude beneath
the ocean floor, I said, and so for a time, I lived
without a car. For a time I refused to ride in cars,
and, for a time, I lived in a car.