Tag: deafness
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A Thing I Do Instead of Sleep
This poem emerged from a sleepless night and a remembered sound—an owl’s hoot imagined against the silence of a hospital corridor. It’s a sonic elegy, a gesture toward the moment my mother’s voice carried the weight of my deafness.
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Wrinkle-less
Wrinkle-less emerged from a moment of reflection on how survival—through illness, loss, and aging—leaves marks that are not always visible. I wanted to resist the cultural shorthand that equates wrinkles with wisdom, virtue or experience, and instead offer a poem where absence becomes a site of consequence. The scars, deafness, and neuropathy I reference are…
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Silent Little Boy
The mother watches her first child in his first wintercatch fistfuls of sun—watches the dust and airriding down to the crib—waiting for the mobile to play sweet music in the arc of light—and the sweep of his hand to its frame.The melody plays but not the words.It’s for mother and childto complete. The mother knows…
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Things Hidden in My Ears
The last hum of mother’s lullaby gently lingers, cradles back and forth, creating equilibrium.Canciones en español,poems in English,birdsongs in the drizzling rain,the faint refrains of all that chooses to linger despite the silence inside.
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Piecing It All Together
I knew the silence before the birdsong— Each note not a note, but plaintive echoes, making painful calls before a leeward wing danced a thrush in the brambles. Author’s note: I spent a considerable part of an afternoon watching videos of blind infants wearing their first pair of glasses. Seeing the world clearly for the…
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Putting Marbles Away
Oh, I wish I could hear the sound of marblesbut my world exists in silence and sight. So I watch my Grandkids collide and scatterthem on the old wooden floorboards.When I put them in their jar, I delight in their smoothness and coolness.They form layers of iridescent swirls, rainbows that light up my worn world.
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The Box That Holds My silence
At bedtimeI sit in my chairand turn offmy long lived hearing aids,putting them in the pine box with the gold leaf claspand a brown phoenixcharred into the lidThe traffic outside dies,the rasping of my dog is silent,my wife’s snoring is muteand the world is so so quiet now. In the morning only the light streaming…