Pantoublock After Visiting My Daughter in Jail
by Zachary Kluckman
After, my son says what the earth erases, we sing back.
The earth is a shell he presses to his tiny pink ear. In my
poem, the sky echoes with hunger in a language of hymns,
but he insists there exists a volume of modern music I can’t
hear with my adult ears. If the trees are left to eat only rust
the prayers leave behind, then their hunger is a language first
discovered by him. Your name raises crosses from my tongue.
Each rust colored tree swollen with forgotten prayer is proof
there is an afterlife where the leaves music sweetens your
name, the way it crosses my tongue when I tell the guard
at the gate we are here to see my daughter & their eyes fill
with ghosts, after every life leaves us, we sweeten our house
with music, but when it is the living we cannot visit without
special permission, without entering a gate that fills an entire
hallway of wailing daughters, the heart cannot encompass
any sound other than the ocean the drowning rise from after
visiting, oxygen permitting, their eyes no longer haunted
because they have seen hearts broken by the sounding, the
depths of the ocean paint their fingernails with a blue I have
seen once before, when the umbilical cord haunting a bowl
like a dry eye in a sterile room loosed my daughter’s first cry,
I was permitted to abandon all previous phantoms, to weep
over the blue eyes, the spiderweb thin nails, the inconceivable
evidence what earth erases, we sing back.
The earth is a shell he presses to his tiny pink ear. In my
poem, the sky echoes with hunger in a language of hymns,
but he insists there exists a volume of modern music I can’t
hear with my adult ears. If the trees are left to eat only rust
the prayers leave behind, then their hunger is a language first
discovered by him. Your name raises crosses from my tongue.
Each rust colored tree swollen with forgotten prayer is proof
there is an afterlife where the leaves music sweetens your
name, the way it crosses my tongue when I tell the guard
at the gate we are here to see my daughter & their eyes fill
with ghosts, after every life leaves us, we sweeten our house
with music, but when it is the living we cannot visit without
special permission, without entering a gate that fills an entire
hallway of wailing daughters, the heart cannot encompass
any sound other than the ocean the drowning rise from after
visiting, oxygen permitting, their eyes no longer haunted
because they have seen hearts broken by the sounding, the
depths of the ocean paint their fingernails with a blue I have
seen once before, when the umbilical cord haunting a bowl
like a dry eye in a sterile room loosed my daughter’s first cry,
I was permitted to abandon all previous phantoms, to weep
over the blue eyes, the spiderweb thin nails, the inconceivable
evidence what earth erases, we sing back.
Zachary Kluckman is an alumnus of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the recipient of the 2024 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, selected by Oliver de la Paz. He is the winner of the Button Poetry Short Form Award. His work appears or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Arts & Letters, Asheville Poetry Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Dear Yusef, among others.