Who Answered First?
There were shoes I couldn’t name. Left near a door that might have been yours. Or mine. Someone answered the silence with a sound that didn’t belong to anyone.
I think I spoke in your voice before you were ready to be spoken again. The window light paused mid-sentence, as if it knew how things were supposed to end.
Your name had already been mentioned, but not by you. I still heard your breath in the part of the air she folded shut. I replied before I read.
We passed once, or maybe I was watching you pass yourself. We didn’t say names. The rain tried. It got them wrong.
There was a page, creased where someone stopped meaning. No sender. No line. It waited for someone who never asked.
She looked like the version of you I hadn’t remembered forgetting. So I let her vanish. That was easier.
I didn’t mean to send it. But the machine said delivered. I didn’t mean to erase it. But I can’t find where I placed the words.
They once said I was you. So I answered. The room didn’t disagree. It never does when everyone’s gone politely wrong.
I kept saying it: once they were yours once they were mine once once once what?
Who were you, if you were ever really the one I thought I was answering?
There’s a sealed thing, not quite envelope, more like a border that forgot which side it kept. I tried to open it once. Or I said I would.
There was no message. Just that noise again. The kind that fits perfectly where nothing should fit. Where no one should be.
Interpretive Poem｜Who Answered First?
The reply came before the call was ever imagined.
She folded the silence into shapes that would not survive a second breath.
Two names slipped through the same doorway— one was never hers, the other was never pronounced.
So the question became a shelter, and the answer a wound too polite to bleed.
Posted Jul 9, 2025, 10:11 PM UTC