Inside Voices

Inside Voices

We don’t know silence here,
we can’t, but we can imagine
it by gathering the available
quiet and pulling it towards us
like stacks of poker chips.

We draw it into our bodies,
the quiet. To listen better,
we make ourselves quiet,
ease air down the trachea
without letting it scrape

against our throat or mouth,
soft-pedal our brain so it
doesn’t crackle as we think.
What parts of yourself
did you trim away when told

to use your inside voice.
Where do our voices hide
within us, our noisy bodies.
What could we feed them
in order to coax them out.