Dear silence

In college, I would disappear into silence.
I don't remember learning much beyond how to live within the silence,
how to divide the hours — hours spent walking through the dirty snow,
pushing a wagon full of groceries under a dark bridge,
glaring at the fast moving traffic zipping over the hill,
tracking melting clumps of snow back into the apartment.
A former student once told me that she couldn't stop
confusing herself with the characters she was reading about.
Where do I end and they begin? I too have lost sight of endings.
I once read about a man who caught and ate a duck he found
in Central Park. It was his first winter and he had no money.
I swear I felt the same shiver in my bones, the same need.
A hunger that spiraled like the endless smog hanging over
my apartment building. Each night, the sky was a hazy orange.
I didn't see the moon for four years. I didn't see myself for four years.
I was giving silence its own song before I learned to love it back.
All that time I thought I was alone. I didn't know the words were listening.

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Jet Fuel Review, Cathexis Poetry Northwest, Pidgeonholes, Santa Clara Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. Her debut chapbooks, Some Wild Woman and Serendipity in France, are forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.