Jane has a secret
she cannot tell anyone.
So she runs.
Jane hates running.
She runs to punish herself
and to forget.
It does not work.
Jane bakes and eats.
She buries the words
inside her under cookies,
stuffs her hollowness
with brownies.
It doesn’t work either.
She just feels disgusted
with herself.
Jane throws up.
Afterwards, the shame
is worse than before.
Jane doesn’t talk to anyone.
She runs. She eats.
The words that can’t get out
eat her from the inside.
She tries to silence them.
There is always another slice of cake.
During the day,
Jane is an accountant.
She drives a car
with good gas mileage
and wears sensible shoes.
The snake plant on her desk
has shiny hard leaves
and needs to be watered
only once a month.
It’s the only thing in her office
that isn’t beige.
At night, Jane writes
in a room with orange walls
and tie dye pillows.
Most of her poems
end with silence.
The silence is so loud
it is painful.
Some of her poems
end with hope.
Jane does not really
believe in hope,
but if you speak
of something often,
perhaps you can
make it come true.
Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T and hikes the Ozarks. She is the author of Porous Land (Spartan Press, 2019) and The Eden of Perhaps (Spartan Press, 2020), and her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines.