People turn into other people when they read poems aloud.
They turn into everyone else who reads poems aloud.
I didn’t. I had to be taught to become a different person
around poetry. I read too fast. Because I thought
reading was something you did with your eyes, not your voice.
An instructor at a writing workshop directed me
to imagine speaking in a Southern accent.
When that didn’t work, he ordered me to actually speak
in a Southern accent.
I was raised to hate the South.
But I called to mind my beloved grandfather,
from Lumpkin, Georgia, and that would always talk to me.
How did he know that silence and death are the same thing?
This equivalence is because words are my eyes.
Which is why not being able to put something
into words is so disorienting.
I want to write about all this,
but none of the words passed down to me
from people long before my parents’ parents
mean whatever it is I feel about time and living and
why I haven’t figured out everything I was sure
as a kid all the adults knew, which was everything.
Pop died before he could tell me everything,
and the silence is blinding.
Megan Wildhood is a writer, editor and writing coach who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her writing, working with her and her mental-health and research newsletter at meganwildhood.com.