The Silence Poem by Timothy Liu

She took the spareribs out of the oven
and set them steaming on a plate
before leaving her apartment.
I didn't know how long to wait,
tore into cold meat when I decided

my mother wasn't coming back.
*
No one knew about the gun she kept
in her purse until the authorities
called—a .38 caliber pistol
with a pearl handle and a trigger
even she could easily pull—
her car still waiting to be towed
from a roadside ditch

when they arrived on the scene.
*
Yesterday morning, I was leaning
over a kitchen sink, my husband
upstairs sleeping. Between his snores
muffled under a down comforter
and a portable electric heater that kept
our bedroom warm, I knew
I could sob as loud as I wanted

without disturbing his dreams.
*
At the sports arena between musical acts
and clouds of dope, I texted my lover
a wide-angle shot of the stage—
the reception bars on my phone
bouncing back and forth between high
and low—a text I had to send
several times before it went through
even though there was a chance
his phone would be off or the text get
lost for hours in the ether, even days.

The silence is the agony.
*
My therapist says: It's not your fault.
No way for you to have known
exactly where your mother was headed.

Then why am I left weeping
in my kitchen decades after the fact?

When I went upstairs and sat
beside my husband, he could feel
the mattress shift beneath our weight
even though I felt much lighter
after watching translucent ropes of snot
lowering down into the sink, arms
around me when I asked if he

was awake, knowing that he wasn't.
*
How many romances get derailed
when a text that has been sent
fails to go through? How many mothers
disappear through a kitchen door
never to return—the food on the table

the last meal they will ever serve?
*
My lover texted back: where are you now?
Having no idea what I'd been
going through when he texted again:

Wish I was there with you.