I listen for context,
willing myself to make out
the space between
that one phrase I caught

and the air
trapped behind it.
I know the words
are all there as is
the telepathic nod
to a joke made
a second late.

The trouble is I can’t
hear well and you
talk softly, or not at all.

We both write.

Selected byNolcha Fox
Image credit:Priscilla Du Preez

Sara Clancy is a Philadelphia transplant to the Southwest.  Her chapbook Ghost Logic won the 2017 Turtle Island Quarterly Editors Choice Award. Among other places, her poems have appeared in Off the Coast, The Linnet's Wings, Crab Creek Review, The Madison Review, Misfit Magazine, Avatar Review and Verse Wisconsin. She lives in the desert with her husband, their dog, two ordinary cats and a psychotic cross-eyed one.