Yes, when I was young I used to hold the thing and make it sing, press fingers into golden keys that glittered, glistened in the natural light let in through the windows.
Please believe me when I tell you I could call the song through a brass horn shaped like black hole’s vortex hammered into tapered form.
Yes it used to shudder on the switch of keys and hemorrhage notes that spoke the world as such it had to be for this metal thing to sing a language only known by birds and trees.
Yes briefly I was an actor making music from the endless march of time. The performance has not ended, only the instrument misplaced and now our stage is deathly quiet.
The only song left is the sound of terror in fingers stretched over futures not yet music, endlessly possible if only I could use it.
But each note is too beautiful, any song a prison, every moment a sacrifice. I find myself frozen, holding notes like children, old friends fading, a lost glint in the corner of a lover’s eyes.
All my breath can stir is silence.
Poem by Jack O’Grady
Image by Adam Strong
Jack O’Grady is currently writing from Boston, but grew up writing from Maryland and graduated with a degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since he began writing seriously, he’s been focused on translating vulnerable experiences with nature and time into stories that strive to question our conception of either. His writing hopes to soften genre and structure into something like a soup, warm and nourishing. Outside of writing, he also writes tabletop games and is one of the founding editors of The Downtime Review, a literary mag dedicated to platforming the work of writers with day jobs. You can find links to his work at: jackogrady.carrd.co.
Backwards Trajectory 