“In music, silence is more important than sound.”
—Miles Davis

Let me tell you something true: when I was thirteen, a man put
his hand over my mouth and I lost my voice

for a decade. Is it grief or grievance that brings me here, to stare into
this hole dug with daggers and tongues? All those tiny

red devils from my dog-eared copy of Steven Crane,
but they never settled in my heart. My throat taught me what home means

before you came along. And now, all these mercies I’ve caught
in this fertile cathedral: the Rose of Sharon in full bloom,

the bumblebees squeezing themselves around the stamens, the ferns
light against the chain link fence, the Japanese beetles

hiding in the fronds, their little legs hyper-extended above their torsos
as my shadow passes over. The prehistoric words of my body,

blood and bone and hand, ghost notes that ring in chorus
with our neighbor yelling again at his dogs. I dislike

the word caught in this context but all I know to do is trap
these moments on the page. You picking a crop of Dragon Tongue beans,

the speckled pods dropping to your basket as you snip them
from their stems. Me dropping the metallic beetles into

soapy water. Me trying to understand why I waited more than a year
to tell you I’d been molested. The birds chatter while they fight

for room in the bird bath and I catch you, briefly, holding
your hand against the sun. Here where we ward against the world,

where we work in the measured beats of our bodies, of blood and tendons
and cracking joints. I want you to know I’d sealed my throat against

the monsters who grew there and when you opened it, all we found
was a boy at the bottom of a well, scared and starving but ready to forgive

me for the darkness where I’d trapped him. Someone, please convince
the neighbor’s dogs to be quiet so we can hear him singing.