Jane McKinley

Silence

Not the golden kind or the ease of two
old friends who have no need for words,
but the kind that moves in overnight—
the ailing grandmother who sits alone
in a corner, earning her keep
by darning socks or stringing beans.
One morning you catch her crossing out
names, unraveling all the stories you knew.

Not a quitter, she smothers you with gossamer.
Even her defense is silent. Implied.
Your heartfelt letter gets lost in the mail
and you can't find the strength to rewrite it.
Remember that Handel sonata you performed?
C Minor? Half an hour after your friend's
lover died? She was the two-measure silence.
You didn't notice you'd stopped playing.

Or my favorite: the silent goodbye. It will never
not haunt you. Either you arrive too late or
your friend kept his illness to himself or
your dear one is halfway between two worlds.
Silence can mask your mother's face with flour,
dry tears, and strips from the obituary page.
It feels like stone. You call her disconnected
number now—to hear it ring.

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Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist who grew up in a small town in Iowa. She is the author of two poetry collections: Vanitas (Texas Tech University Press, 2011), which won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize, and Mudman, which was a finalist for the 2023 Able Muse Book Award, but is not yet published. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, on Poetry Daily and elsewhere. In 2023, she was awarded a poetry fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She was a 2025 Fellow at the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts.