I sit in the forbidden room a chair by your bed holding my weight in stones, in sorrows in uncountable grains of touch you can still speak so I lean over to catch your voice in my mouth to swallow these bits warm in beak and you tell me I was always the quiet one and you don’t know about all the words layered in me like rotting leaves so many things I have said inside the cavern of my chest full of nervous screeching bats flitting around while things I don’t say pile up light cuts across your blankets and I am afraid to touch you because you are a pillar of pain and this is the bad thing this is the moment I remember and write over and over and over always that light and my own body screaming from every rivet I promise now to go over the years to scratch the earth of your love for me to erect those landscapes eclipses rays shimmering like milk in sky —so I say— but this poem goes down the same mournful path and out the window blackbirds have come to eat what I have scattered on blurred and foggy ground *from “Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)” by Kaveh Akbar Crab Creek Review 2018 Vol. 2