The Night Voice

You called about nothing: the bus was late, your soup had spilled,

My mother signs her name on the final line, then reads it once more.

They call me by a number because the hallway is crowded, not because I have become one.

In the parking lot I kneel beside your backpack and ask what happened

I tried to rhyme love and found the usual words waiting in a line.

Monday is a locked gate. Tuesday, the key that bends. Wednesday is a bridge

Rain follows us beneath the roof at Cardiff Central, shining on coats and platform signs.

Above the laundromat sign, the moon keeps no appointment. Below it, shirts revolve,

Your train leaves the coast as mine enters the city. Between us: five stations,

At six I begin listening for a sound that will not come. The kettle finishes.

The draft comes back with more red than black. For an hour I confuse correction

I knew your page by its smallest changes: a new photograph, one sentence removed,

By morning, the flags are damp. Someone sweeps confetti from the station. The winning shirt is still worn proudly.

At the class reunion, she brings the yearbook with its promises in blue ink:

At the funeral, someone repeats our joke and waits for the room to understand.

He sends good morning while my street is turning dark. I listen beside the laundry,

The weekend goodbye was dramatic enough: platform, coffee going cold,

On her final Friday, the bus follows its usual argument with traffic.

The screen asks whether I am sure. Progress since the last checkpoint will be lost.

Some mornings I describe myself as if reporting on a stranger: She found the keys.

At midnight I open the dictionary looking for another word for tired. It offers weary, spent, exhausted,

Your eyes meet mine, then choose the windowpane, as if the rain has said what I could not. I know affection cannot be a chain,

Tell me the difficult part before it grows. Return when the first answer was not enough. Use my name without using it against me.

They have worshiped three rows apart since the argument. On Family and Friends Sunday,

I will not say nothing will change. The truth deserves better. Calls will be missed.

Everyone agreed in the room. That was the first warning. In the hallway, objections surfaced

No thunder follows. The horizon opens and closes its pale electric mouth.

You have repeated the same warning for forty-three minutes. I heard you the first time.

Today my mind predicts one hundred percent disaster with scattered embarrassment

We invite the small black cylinder onto the kitchen shelf. It tells the weather,

My sister sends a video of me saying words I never said. The mouth is mine.

In every room I count the exits, measure the windows,

It learns what makes me pause: the cleaner kitchen, the brighter skin,

We crop the washing from the chair, the argument from the doorway, the hour we spent not speaking.

A red number gathers in the corner of the morning. One becomes five.

My thumb keeps lowering the bucket. News, wedding, wildfire, joke. A dog in a yellow coat.

Every app asks to know me: where I slept, what I bought,

I wrote the new address on twenty envelopes. Each time, the letters looked borrowed.

Beautiful is not what light does to your face. It is what you do with light:

We live three time zones apart. Your morning reaches me at lunch. My bad news wakes beside your bed.

At closing time, the books pretend to sleep. The atlases flatten their seas.

One more minute, I said, and the minute built a room. It hung our coats,

I loved you through thirteen winters, through nine thousand cups of tea, through enough rain to float the house

Say home and a lamp comes on. Say mother and rain begins somewhere behind the ribs.

I have waited a century for your message to turn blue. Civilizations rose in the kitchen.

In the museum of small noises I keep the click of your key, the cupboard closing softly,

She wore the backpack like a turtle shell—too big for the body, perfect for the bravery.

I love you the way women have always loved women—quietly at first, then all at once, then with a fury that rewrites the rules.

I want to say the thing you already know but haven't heard out loud—the thing that sits in the back of your chest like a fist that forgot to open.

Black history is not a month. Black history is the woman who sat down and the man who stood up and the children who walked into schools that didn't want them.

Being in love is the thing that comes after the fireworks—the quiet drive home with the windows down and someone's hand on your knee.

Because the body knows things the mind won't admit—and music is the language the body speaks when words have failed their shift.

Because prose takes the highway and poetry takes the fire escape—both get you there but one shows you the view from the outside of the building.

You didn't say the right thing. You didn't say anything. You just showed up with food and sat in my mess like it was your living room.

Two oranges in my jacket—heavy as the future, round as the world I wanted to give her but couldn't afford.

They were not romantic. They were young and poor and armed, which America has always confused with romance.

At 3 AM the hospital breathes differently—a low hum of machines keeping promises the doctors wrote and went home.

My father's car was a 1987 something—I forget the model but remember the sound: a cough that meant winter.

The line goes out. The line comes back empty. This is the lesson: most of what you cast into the world returns without what you wanted.

I've been trying to describe your eyes for six years and I keep getting it wrong.

You pack what you can carry. Not what you need—what you can carry.

When you died in the game, the screen went dark and two words appeared: Continue? Game Over.

I don't know what it means. The museum card says Oil on canvas, 1889.

Everyone remembers the fall. Nobody talks about the flying.

The lights go down and we become anonymous— a room full of strangers agreeing to feel together.

Korea is a peninsula— land reaching into water like a hand trying to touch something.

He's always there when I arrive—waiting, with my face but not my certainty.

She walks like she knows something the room doesn't.

Dear Space, I know you're mostly nothing. Ninety-nine point nine percent of you is empty.

First: wonder. Something happens that shouldn't— an apple falls, a mold kills bacteria.

The bell is ringing somewhere. Not for you—not yet— but don't ask who it's for.

Wales doesn't shout. Wales hums. It hums in the valleys where the coal used to live.

They weren't lying about the green. But they didn't tell you there'd be forty shades.

When you set out for Ithaca— and you will set out, everyone does.

There is a dialect spoken only in the dark— not because it's shameful.

Quédate, no porque yo te lo pida, sino porque la noche es más larga.

Hay palabras que se quedaron en la garganta— no por cobardía.

Love is like a house fire— not the kind that starts in the kitchen.

Don't start with what it means. Start with how it sounds.

"Thin" and "slender" mean the same thing except they don't.

The body knows things the mind will never admit.

At first it was a guest. Showed up uninvited but charming.

The caged bird knows things the free bird never has to learn.

I looked it up: inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn't just grow wings. It dissolves.

Strength is not the fist. It's the unclenching.

I used to think peace was silence— the absence of noise.

Under the lights every town is the same town.

They call it the beautiful game and they're wrong— it's the desperate game.

The world decided to start over last night.

Missing someone is not an emotion. It's a location.

I mean I memorized the sound of your breathing when you're almost asleep.

I carry a country that fits in no suitcase, that cannot be folded into neat squares.

My therapist says I hide in metaphors.

You didn't have to. That's the part I keep coming back to.

Loneliness is not being alone. I want to be clear about that.

This poem is not going to pretend it knows what you're feeling.

Time takes the things you thought were permanent.

A book is a door that doesn't need a key.

I know you're tired. I know the kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix.

The best basketball happens after the game. When the gym is locked and the scoreboard is off.

You're not going to believe this, but the thing that's breaking you right now won't matter in three years.

You will outgrow shoes. This is expected. You will outgrow clothes, bedrooms.

Beauty is not what you think. It's not the sunset. Everyone agrees about the sunset.

The moon has heard every confession ever whispered from a bedroom window.

There is an age— somewhere between three and five— when a child discovers the most powerful word in any language.

Other men describe their wives like cars they've owned too long. I refuse.

The man at the coffee shop paid for the person behind him. This is not the poem.

They tried to write us out of the story. Edited us to margins.

I didn't marry the woman I fell in love with. I married the one who showed up after.

Today is not special. No one circled it on a calendar.

You didn't bring flowers. You brought takeout and the correct opinion about the show I was watching.

I know your name but not the one on your driver's license.

Because the news tells you what happened but a poem tells you what it felt like.

I'm going to say what I mean. No metaphors. No curtains.

You've spent thirty years trying to be quieter, smaller, more convenient—

I know your tired. Not the kind that sleep fixes.

Even now, when nothing seems to hold, Nothing keeps the dark from pressing close— Dawn is just a rumor, barely told,

You will not remember the quadratic formula. I know this because I don't.

Someone told me once that poetry is for school. That it lives between September and June.

He doesn't know I keep a list. Not on paper—in the body, in the part that doesn't forget.

You don't keep score. That's how I know.

Every night I visit a house I have never lived in but my hands know where the light switch is.

It's not the grand gestures. It's not the airport sprint, the boom box on the lawn.

I mean the way he folds the map even though the phone knows where we are. I mean the scar above his eyebrow

You are the person I don't clean the house for. This is the highest compliment I know.

You have never asked me how my day was and yet you are the only one

We are forty now and live in different cities with different groceries. You buy oat milk. I buy the regular kind.

She does this thing with bobby pins— holds three between her lips like small dark fish

You are not the friend who arrives with flowers. You are the friend

O body, you magnificent disaster, you creak now getting out of chairs and take the stairs a half-beat slower

This morning you stood at the mirror and cursed your hair with a creativity

I used to draw the map with more on it— the house would be bigger, the job would have a window,

When I was young, the afternoons were countries with no border known, and summer hummed its lazy tunes

We don't say I love you anymore. We say: your phone is at eleven percent. We say: I picked up the thing

My hands still set the table for two. Not every night—just Thursdays, when my hands forget

The house at three a.m. becomes a throat that hums with all the things we didn't say, and I lie still as someone in a boat

I woke before you and did nothing about it. The radiator ticked. Your shoulder rose and fell.

I write you letters in my head on the bus, in the shower, in the three seconds

There's a word for the way your coffee cup still sits on the second shelf where no one else would put it—