quietude ovenbird The high school cafeteria is an iron maiden, a room that closes around me and pierces a thousand holes in my nervous system with sonic stakes.The girls at my table are talking loudly through mouthfuls of raw hamburger. The meat spills from their lips and lands in their laps. The force of their ugly laughter sprays me with spit and blood. I stare at the weeping beef patty on the plate in front of me and wish that I too could be ground to a fleshy paste. I see you, suddenly, across the room, and I wave the way a drowning person waves. You catch the desperate motion of my arms and weave through the sea of bodies to the place where I am slowly dying. You sit, and take my hands so gently, and your eyes find mine, and everything goes still all at once. The volume of the world comes down and down and down until there is no sound beyond the two of us breathing. We are alone and the cafeteria walls are white light and the tables are sun off the surface of a frozen lake and dust motes are suspended in the air. I’ve never known such layered silence. It has poetry under its translucent skin. You pull a book from your pocket and read me the words of Langston Hughes: I catch the pattern Of your silence Before you speak. I do not need To hear a word. In your silence Every tone I see Is heard. And my hand is in yours, and my breath is in your lungs, and your unspoken words run red from my fingertips. 260216 what's it to you? who go blather from