Description
Winner of the Fall 2014 Black River Chapbook Competition
Through vivid and sometimes startling image and music, Radio Silence turns absence into sound. The poems in this new collaborative collection by Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney come up against death and pursue its mysteries: its arrival, its damages, and its meaning for those on the periphery. This is a world where “orange trees rise / from the pockets of the dead, / where we burn / hornet nests and keep / watermelons in the well, / where ghosts have a way / of making themselves / found.”
This is a world that hinges on transitions-young boys crawling in the attic become old men opening wrinkled palms; a sky of magpies becomes a sky of crows. The result is a collection of stripped-down, urgent poems that make no clear boundary between the authors’ identities. From this liminal space emerges a third voice that is both and neither and something in-between. “In the forgetting / dark, we take off our names. We become / something like lightning, cracked bone.”
STATIC WOUND
There is a silence as old
as silence. A dead blue jay
flat against a road, sewage
drain where its heart
used to metronome.
This story is a country
folding like a card table,
filled with cigarette burns
and blonde pillow hairs
from an old lover, sequins
along a pretty girl’s arms.
Trees collect kites, moons
swell inside other moons
like oysters unsnapping
beneath the charm of
a necklace, a sea of stars.
Think blood as the past life
of red. What is given and what
was taken. All we clamor for-
a shot at being happy,
a few wars to learn what
we love. The bar to be
as empty as the day it was full.
