The First Sound

Before I had a drum in my ear,
before I had an ear even,
I had sound that was no sound:
a pulse through my heart

when I was mostly only a heart,
a slim of spine, and curled brow.
I knew the slosh of slick liquid
on my skin, that transparent

sheath of almost only water.
I knew the tumble of my heavy
head-first, that buoyant seahorse
bobbing-business, suspense.

I knew the rock and cradle
of her pelvis, that bony gait
and swagger, and her stillness.
My first love was that stillness:

already I could move without
her moving. And I could
hear without ears the sound
of my own bones lengthening,

the buzzy wiring of a new brain,
and the seeds of teeth sleeping
in my mashy gums. The speed
of my life: the speed of sound.

Our Waters

My mother can no longer manage her washing,
the reach up into her own hair, the lathering and rinse,
so I climb into the shower with her and she laughs.
I soap-up her freckled back and ribs, the suds
making things easier between us.

I remember the day she taught me how to dive,
both of us perched at the end of the board.
She leans over me, pressing my head
down, her pelvis warm against my hip.
She says something about my elbows or toes
and I see us in the pool water below, our skin
and suits glassy, flashing. She pushes me
and I tip toward our reflection, my hands
reaching for the two of us, splitting the surface.
I’ve gone in with my mouth open, so I come up
spouting like a whale to make her smile. Later
I will sit between her legs, let her towel-dry my hair,
lean back into her eager rubbing around my ears.
Within a year I’ll be too old for anything, the miles
of breaststroke and crawl: my race away from her.
I barely let her touch me from then on, her hands
like fire; our words grow teeth.

But now, I offer to carry her to bed, she’s that small.
She’ll let me dry her hair, a petted cat; I tuck her in
and kiss her on the brow, and marvel
at the way we made it back.

Our Revision                                                                                                

Death hits the Backspace bar and we’re
erased, one by one, the story of us, every letter
like a mother and father before us, behind us,
their bodies swept back, under the margins.

It swallows up language the way, now, what
I once said to you is gone, the way what
I want to say sits like a drift against my teeth,
a dull tongue. The history of everything we know.

Suddenly we have the unanswerable questions, our child
needs details for the seventh-grade ancestry assignment.
We are ashamed not to know what we were not told, what
we did not know to ask, what was kept from us.

Is that the ever always? Where
is the page before this page? What
was the line before the first line? And what
was there before the word? Nothing?

Can I say I knew your nothingness?

Not everything is language. There is the unlanguage,
the no mind, the there is, and is of, the I am, and
the blood and vein and muscle and cell and cell wall
and cell water and not water: all the wilderness of the body.

Science tells us we are mostly space, mostly not matter.
Maybe then, we’ll someday be more of what we once were.
If most of what is me is what cannot be seen, then my
unsomethingness will still be here for my son; yes?

Some say they can still smell their lost beloveds. I say:
Yes, of course. That which you cannot see is right beside
you. The sea can be heard in a shell or a soup can. It is
not a trick; it’s there to be heard. And we are— like the sea,

and the seeing— we are larger than our bodies; consider
the expansive contraction of the tides, the way light travels
from every star. It keeps going. And your breath, when it
leaves you, is still your breath. Still yours, and mine, too.

Poet, artist, and educator, Kelly Cass Falzone, earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University, and MSEd in Counselor Education from SUNY Brockport. Her poetry appears in journals such as Stone Canoe, Nashville Arts Magazine, and Clackamas Literary Review, and has earned recognition from the Medmic Summer Poetry Contest 2024,The Bea Gonzalez Prize for Poetry, The Libba Moore Gray Prize in Poetry, and two Tennessee Writers Alliance Poetry Awards among others. Having written, produced, and directed shows for the stage, Kelly’s collaboration with Southern Word entitled “Nashville Now: Literary Census” was recognized with a “Spoken Word Trailblazer Award” from Soul Food Poetry Café. She was most recently named an OZ Arts/Porch Art Wire Fellow for 2024-2025 season. Originally from Rochester, NY, Kelly has lived in Nashville, TN, for over thirty years.