Unspeaking by Elizabeth Cohen

Unspeaking

“The world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”
― Clarice Lispector

I love how we send words away to rest
having done enough work for now.
Yours, the silence of canyons in the heat of the day.
Mine the silence of animals in shadows of trees.
Together we are the rest notes of music,
the empty space after thunder,
the gap in the conversation of weather.

Turns out, each moment is not waiting for a sound to fill it.
Whole hours await the arrival of nothingness.
That is us. Pause and Caesura.
We are the vacation of language.
This is how I will remember you.
By all the things you did not say.
And all the ways I did not answer you.

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Elizabeth Cohen lives and writes in New Mexico and Costa Rica where she lives with her dog, Layla. Her poems have been published in Patterson Review, Blue Mesa, San Antonio Review, Mid-Atlantic Review, Yale Review, and other publications. She is the author of The Family on Beartown Road, a memoir (Random House); The Hypothetical Girl (Random House/Penguin/Other Press), short stories, and six books of poetry, most recently, Mermaids of Albuquerque (Saint Julian Press), a 2025 New Mexico Book awards finalist.