We stopped speaking to each other
sometime in the day to day montage
of going to work and coming home from work,
of writing papers and grading papers,
of aligning calendars and mis-scheduling whole days,
of dirtying dishes and washing dishes,
and of taking the dog to the park,
of saying “I love you” and meaning it.
We do “mean it,” but our language has decayed,
and verbs without nouns spin uselessly
until they fall. Gaps and gasps have become
our rhetorical structure, and the dog seems
more articulate, but only because our tongues lull,
hang sideways from our lips, thick with disuse.
Angelina recently finished her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and is currently a lecturer at Clemson University. Her poems are forthcoming or have been published in various journals including Yemassee, Cold Mountain Review, Italian Americana, Louisiana Literature, and Southern Indiana Review.
