Culture & Media
No One Spoke
for at least an hour. Maybe longer. It was longer.
No one spoke, looked away, or drew attention
with their hands. A few of us opened our mouths,
a few always do. We didn’t know we’d done it.
No one saw. Like losing a button. We were busy
not speaking. We had drinks, a few snacks, watched
TV with the sound off. A few of us thought about
the button, the one that says MUTE, how common
it is now. We tried to imagine it on other things,
things that don’t speak but are loud: lamps, guns,
a fire truck with MUTE painted on it. It would’ve
looked good on us, stenciled white across our chests.
We wore dark colors, earth tones. No one calls them
dirt tones or soil. It’s what we mean: mud, rot,
the heap of life. It’d be hard to sell clothes with
names like that. Hard to give them away. Maybe
if they were gifts. We’d all accept with a nod,
like we did when your picture came our way.
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Brendan Constantine’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including Ploughshares, FIELD, Zyzzyva, Poetry Daily and ArtLife. His most recent collections are Birthday Girl With Possum (2011) and Calamity Joe (2012). He is poet in residence at the Windward School and adjunct professor at Antioch University. He regularly offers classes to hospitals, prisons, shelters and with the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project.
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