She smiles,
a slow, careful smile
that curdles on top like bad milk,
a skin freezing in increments over troubled
waters. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says
to the accompaniment of the skeletons doing a jig in her coat closet.
Silence sits upon silence,
a mute accumulation;
minutes,
days,
months,
years,
a hush pervades them all.
He won’t acknowledge
the white elephant in the room,
so neither will she;
the stillness deafens,
the lulls clamour,
all resound
with secret censorship
that wails without sound in her heart,
pounds and crackles in his brain.
He looks at her with a nameless longing,
she cries noiselessly into midnight pillows –
but still, the stillness snags,
expanding the girth
of their
white elephant.
*
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