Calls

Annika Gangopadhyay

i. Hello?

pressing your voice to my ear only makes sweet music drag against a sidewalk. i wonder how to find the shudder, the slip, the dance of skipping stones on water in this static basin when everything falters, crashes into corrosive rocks and black halts the foaming gray. when i grope in the dark mellifluous cadences dry and cracked pierce my ears, though with my back turned, i want to break open this cracked hull between us.

ii. Hello.

the difference between an empty greeting and a forgotten goodbye is the way i wait for that voice to leap over seconds, minutes, hours, lifetimes, waiting for the youth i saw to come comes back from the death i hear.  how can this song reach its end when we never sang the beginning?

iii. Are you alright?

i want to weave locks of your hair from strands of memories i want to know if the miracles that abrade your laughs and cries have turned them gray i ran my fingers through the night sky one day and though it’ll never be the same i want to know if the silence i hear took it away and left it starless.

iv. Where are you?

the emptiness sits on my earlobe and somehow this weight is how i know you aren’t gone or lost yet you shipwreck me and you pulled out all the stars there is nothing to save me from this erosion because we both sit on either side of a broken hull and i only wait for the moment i can submerge it, the moment when the static sinks into waves.