by Olivia
Dialing the Unknown
I reach to turn the dial.
Questions gather like dust,
soft and silver, patient as ghosts.
The silence trembles wild and sharp.
Outside, the wind spirals.
Inside, the quiet grows teeth,
gnawing at my thoughts.
The spoons too bright,
too metallic, too alive.
The room is twitching
with half-remembered electricity. Your memory,
gold dust and breath.
It talks sometimes, saying
it misses the part of you
that kept the chaos in rhythm.
I fail to answer
and cling to the static,
stuck between frequencies of maybe.
Your silence means it’s me;
that I’m the hum in the wires,
the failed key.
Still, I reach and I twist.
Because leaving the dial untouched
feels like letting the obscure win.
The radio blinks its red eye;
I unplug it, I’m not paranoid,
just wary of what it dreams.
Outside, even the birds hold their breath while
Fear eats quietly,
leaving its dishes behind:
a single sock,
a dead moth,
a cold scarf.
I ask the questions injected with glimmering danger.
I cradle the want I can’t stand to bare.
I don’t need certainty,
just this heartbeat of wonder,
this trembling ache that something is there,
glowing just beyond what I can see.
I will mail you doves,
And when they rise in the sky
I’ll shout truths the air can’t hold:
that I don’t like black coffee,
that grief tastes like iron and sunlight,
that love is still the brightest possibility I know.
So pry me from this turning dial if you must,
but understand:
the static hums,
the future shivers,
but I am still here,
still scared,
still listening to my unplugged radio.
Living, afraid of the unknown.