When I am silenced, can you not still hear my screams?

There are times my words stop flowing, when they seize and resist any release. And then it hurts so bad I am forced to cut deep into my skin and let the pain flow in fragments, in heaves, in a silent river of tears. I cry in prose, I pray in fire.

This is my whispered scream.

I am a stranger in familiar land

A tree grown in desert sand

I am wavering and wandering, holding on to a dream

I am shrinking, I am weeping, undone at the seams

This ever-shifting ground will not give

It rumbles

it shakes

it…

crawls back into hiding

clutching hope’s labored breaths

blood and bones absolving all the sins and senseless deaths

Bright red lives moving on

keep going with the flow

choice is but an empty word

with no place left to go

And I stand in wooded slopes

empty fields

heavy homes

and dig

and dig

and dig

to find

the bodies that were left behind

when my voice stuck deep in my throat

cut down by someone’s wrenching belief

some broken-record history

both…

And I remain silent

quiet as a corpse

tell me, please

I beg you

can you not still hear my screams?