Austin Alexis
Social Distance
Percussive silence
won’t leave me alone.
Loud in the pantry,
louder in the garage.
My solitude is enforced.
My solitude is a cloth
doused with bleach
and pressed to my mouth.
My solitude is crowded
with quiet.
The odor of loneliness
owns all my minutes.
Even when I leave
my empty house—
roam about the streets—
involuntary reclusiveness
claims my legs,
stains my clothing, my teeth,
my stretch of days
that are no longer mine
but belong to the hush
at the center of today.
—Submitted on
Austin Alexis is the author of Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press, 2014), winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; Lovers and Drag Queens (Poets Wear Prada, 2014) and For Lincoln & Other Poems, (Poets Wear Prada, 2010). His work has appeared in Barrow Street, The Pedestal Magazine, The Journal, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015), edited by Joel Allegretti; Suitcase of Chrysanthemums (Great Weather for Media, 2018), edited by Jane Ormerod, Thomas Fucaloro, and David Lawton. He received a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholarship, and teaches at New York City College of Technology.
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