by Nicole Santalucia

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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Silence snaps in the wind
next to a confederate flag
on the back of a pickup truck.

On a Sunday afternoon, silence
carves into a farmer’s throat.
It grows behind the chicken coop.

Silence is on Post Road across the street
from jail. It shuffles across cement floors
in sandals and white socks, sits under
a pill in a paper cup.

Drug addicts overdose on silence
behind the warehouse near Exit 52.
Silence is a needle mark between toes.
It is the dirt under my fingernails.

Exhaust pipes and horses choke
on silence. Engines and people
and guns tried to sink silence
in the Susquehanna River,
but silence shot back and started war.

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Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize, and Arkana Magazine's Editor’s Choice Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Best American Poetry, Palette Poetry, The Colorado Review, North American Review, and Los Angeles Review as well as other journals and anthologies. She is an Associate Professor, the Director of First-Year Writing, and a member of the LGBTQ+ Advisory Council at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.