you’re talking about your day
but all i hear is the space
between words, the small gaps
where meaning should be.
like a badly tuned radio,
we keep fading in and out—
one minute clear as summer
lightning, the next just
white noise and distance.
remember when conversation
felt like breathing? now
we choose our words like
landmine hopscotch, testing
each step before we leap.
dinner gets cold while we
warm up old arguments,
reheat yesterday’s silence.
the microwave counts down
in mechanical heartbeats.
somewhere between “how was work”
and “i’m fine,” we lost
the frequency we used to share.
now we’re just static,
two stations playing
different songs
on the same channel.
i want to reach across
the kitchen table, adjust
our antenna, fine-tune us
back to clarity. but my hands
stay busy with fork and knife,
cutting everything into
manageable pieces.
maybe tomorrow we’ll find
the right wavelength,
or maybe we’ll keep searching
through this interference,
hoping to catch fragments
of what we used to be.
Emma Lopez is a high school junior from Austin, Texas. Their work has appeared in TeenInk, and they are currently working on their first collection of poetry. When not writing, she practices archery and sells watercolor paintings of Texas wildflowers.