Static

Between the stations, this—
a hiss like sand poured slow across a drum,
a thousand tiny needles finding skin
at once, then gone, then back again.

Turn the dial. Nothing settles.
Just the ghost of someone's voice
half-drowned in white, in snow,
in sound that isn't sound so much as almost—

a word caught halfway through its own mouth,
a name you nearly catch before it drops
back into the hiss, the fizz,
the sizzle-fry of frequencies that won't align.

The air before a storm does this too:
that itch along the arms, the fine hairs lifting,
the sky holding its breath in volts
it hasn't spent yet. Something's coming.
Something's always coming, never here.

I think of the word almost as a kind of weather—
low pressure system stalled above the chest,
a tuning fork struck once and left to hum
in a room where no one's listening.

This is the feeling: dial spinning,
signal bleeding into signal,
your call going out and coming back
scrambled, doubled, wrong—
two voices talking over one another
in a language made of static,
made of nearly, made of not quite yet.

Somewhere a station's playing clear.
You can almost hear the song beneath the noise—
a melody ghosting through the interference,
close enough to hum along
but never close enough to name.

So you sit with the crackle.
You let the white noise fill the spaces
where the words should be,
and call it, for now, a kind of company—
this static, this almost-music,
this signal reaching out
through the storm of everything
it hasn't said yet.