Sylvia Byrne Pollack
More About What the Deaf Woman Doesn’t Want to Hear About
The screams of drilling, of trees falling, water diverting, fracking in
national parks and forests makes the tiny bones in her ears vibrate
in pain.
The deaf woman forces herself to listen.
She turns up the volume on the TV, hears wails of people and sirens, sees
carnage caused by an unhinged man with an unlimited supply of
automatic weapons and ammunition shooting into the fishbowl of
20,000 concert goers.
The deaf woman cannot distinguish her tinnitus’ trill from the shrieking
sirens.
It is all too much.
Just like it was the last time, and the time before that and soon the next
time as we manage to average one mass murder a day in these
Disintegrating States of America.
No one should have to hear this—hear of it, hear about it, hear how it went
down.
The mood of the country is sinking, sucked down by a fair-haired fat baby
president latched onto the nipple of America, sucking her dry,
spitting up all over her, pleased with himself.
The deaf woman hears her own revulsion.
It holds her head in its hands.
Sylvia Byrne Pollack’s work has appeared in Floating Bridge Review, Crab Creek Review, Clover, and Antiphon, among other journals. A recipient of the 2013 Mason’s Road Winter Literary Award and a finalist for the 2014 inaugural Russell Prize, she is currently writing a series of “Deaf Woman Poems” inspired by Marvin Bell’s “Dead Man Poems.”
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