Mute
by Katie Turner
I stayed home
while you dodged bullets
I studied Shakespeare
while you puzzled out signs in Arabic
I wrote poems to read in bars
when I should have written you
letters
you won’t say but
I can see
your time there haunts you
still
we walk the streets
you scan the rooftops
wary of snipers in our sleepy mountain town…
you try
to return to yourself
try
to go back to school
go back to work
try to pry
the sand out of your bones
with toothpicks made in China.
the sticky grains
don’t budge
and I try
to understand how
your skin came back without you in it
and I wonder
what it’s like now—
to leave a land but always
be dreaming in it
we sit next to each other
you stare ahead while I grieve
you were a poet once
and could sing
now your memories march
to form a line between us
as wide as the desert
dry as the desert
mute
as the desert
Katie Turner is a theatre artist and scholar with a life-long love of writing. Her poetry has been published in the 2018 San Diego Poetry Annual and the 2018 Beatitude Beat Poet Anthology. Katie currently produces theatrical work with Oracle Performing Arts and is a lecturer in Theatre History at San Diego State University.
