One Noticed
I don't know when
my tongue grew still,
when the last syllable
failed to arrive.
At first
they mistook it
for another silence,
something a man
could wear.
Then one noticed
the dark petals
beneath my feet,
the smell
of earth after rain.
Nothing
needed saying.
Jim Zola is a recently retired children’s librarian. He grew up in upstate New York and has lived in Missouri, Michigan and now North Carolina for the past 32 years. Past occupations include a teacher at the school for the Deaf, security guard, and toy designer for Fisher-Price. His poetry books include One Hundred Bones of Weather (Blue Pitcher Press, 1990), What Glorious Possibilities (Aldrich Press, 2014), Monday After the End of the World (Kelsay Books, 2020), Erasing Cabeza de Vaca (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2020), It’s the Unremarkable That Will Last (Redhawk Publications, 2024), winner of the Lena Shull Book Award.