The Sounds by Hannah Pedersen

The Sounds

By Hannah Pedersen

To remove the unnecessary and surfaced talk,

what are the layers underneath it?

Unsettled emotions of death and nothing.

The reason for the useless and incessant.

Distractions, creating the mindless,

rewiring life to be endless, lost and escaped

in which we are forever, or our stories at least.

Passed down in stories, forms of forever in pages.

But as a I stop, I look up to find everyone still moving,

despite my best efforts of tales from another life,

their epilogues forever untold, at least non-autobiographical.

I see a girl, stopping in the mindless too.

The silence between us, we cannot hear.

She moves and turns, gestures of worlds,

with her hands she waves, shaking her presence.

Then she begins to laugh, in the middle of motion,

laughing and giggling in the silence.

Laughing so hard, I can almost see her breath,

although it’s July.

The season is merely poised, a distraction in changes,

she looks at me again.

In her cloud of imagined world of jokes, 

expelled from somewhere deep inside her mind,

she shouts a single joyful word,

vanishing in the silence.

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Sotto Voce

By John Brehm

To strip away this incessant chatter,

yes, but what lies underneath it?

Death, of course, or our fear of death.

Which is why we talk so much,

bury our heads in books, turn forests

into pages and pages into mirrors

in which we see ourselves appear

and disappear. When I look up

from the story I've been reading

about the Jews in Nazi Germany

and the silence that closed their

mouths forever, I see a girl outside

the cafe smiling in at her father

who smiles back but cannot hear her.

She makes all kinds of gestures

with her hands, mimes herself

inside an invisible box and breaks

down laughing. Then she gathers

her breath and blows it against

the window. It is not snowing

outside, the leaves have hardly begun

to turn, the season is merely poised

for the long descent, but still

the glass steams up. And in this

little cloud of warmth that's come

from deep inside her body, she

writes a single joyful word, which

vanishes almost before she finishes.