These two poems by Michael Caylo-Baradi meditate on the aleatory attributes of departure in hindsight. Here, one is textured with drama and emotions, while the other presents a still-life of objects soaking up the silence of an abandoned afternoon…
by: Michael Caylo-Baradi
Refuge Tell me more about the storms inside your mouth. How many borders have they crossed? Tell me how the mountains shaped the words of God you chewed each day, begging for the milk and honey wasted in another continent. I’ve heard of boats sinking in the cries of children, silenced in the hollows of the moon. You always dig out bodies in your voice, friends you left beside a nameless road: they fill my lungs with memories buried in a box of photographs. You never fail to name an ocean in your dreams, rising from the height of errant wars. They crash on longings every day, dreaming to depart, to breathe the deserts you have crossed
Silence in the Afternoon
The garden holds
another afternoon
gushing from a hose.
Soon, a cloud of slurs
aborts the presence of a hand
mapping out its flow.
This time, the water
finds its way
into the driveway,
into the silence
of the street, beyond
the corrugations of its skin.
//
In the house,
the living room is shaken
by a sound.
The phone insists
to hear a voice,
the one that filled the air
some hours ago,
wrestling with the vowels
of another scream.
//
The wind chimes
rest into their
usual lullaby.
The crickets, too,
will sink the property
in cries,
to celebrate
the disappearance
of the sun
Michael Caylo-Baradi is an alumnus of The Writers’ Institute at The Graduate Center (CUNY). His work has appeared in The Adirondack Review, Across The Margin, Another Chicago Magazine, Hobart, Kenyon Review, The Common, The Galway Review, The Halo-Halo Review, MiGoZine, PopMatters,
