Underwater rumblings off the coast of Oregon,
apt occurrences while I ponder seismic waves
crashing through my brain. How much pain
can you possibly cause all these years later?
The Richter Scale is too limited
to characterize the silence creeping
through phone lines that jerk starlings
this way and that. What right do you have
to ask: Is that situation still the same?
As if “autism” is a dirty word, a word for quiet
utterance in sentences divorced
from a child’s name. Yes, that situation
is still the same and we don’t expect
it to change between now
and your next call, another 8 years away.
Ocean beds quiver. Starfish point in five directions,
and clawed creatures follow them all in the jumbled
mess of my mind. If you knew him, you would love him.
I let you drift away again like flotsam on a quaking tide.
Header photograph © Chris Nielsen.
Larina Warnock is a high school teacher in Roseburg, Oregon. A one-time teen mother and high school dropout, she now holds a doctorate degree from Creighton University. She has been a TEDx speaker, and her work has appeared in Touch: The Journal of Healing, Cloudbank, The New Verse News, and others. Her chapbook, Guitar Without Strings, is available from The Lives You Touch Publications.
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