STATIC IS WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN THINGS

There is a moment
before lightning decides to become lightning,
when the hair on your arms rises
for no reason you can explain.

That is static.

Not the spark.

The warning.

The body receiving news
before the mind has learned
there is news.

At the supermarket,
a woman drops a glass jar.

Everyone turns.

For one clean second
we are the same animal:

heads lifted,
muscles listening,
eyes searching for the wound.

Then someone laughs.

Then someone says,
It's okay.

It isn't.

The glass is still there.

The word okay
has simply been thrown over it.

Static.

My mother says my name
from another room.

I answer.

She says it again.

I answer again.

Neither of us moves.

There are days
when a house becomes so full of unsaid things
that even ordinary words
arrive distorted.

Pass the salt.

Did you lock the door?

Are you coming?

Nothing is wrong.

Nothing is wrong.

Nothing is...

INTERFERENCE

A fly beats itself
against the window
with astonishing faith.

Again.

Again.

Again.

The glass is invisible
except to the body.

Perhaps that is what pain is:

a boundary
you only discover
by repeatedly becoming bruised against it.

Outside, before rain,
the trees turn their leaves over.

Thousands of pale undersides
appearing at once.

A crowd changing its mind.

The sky darkens
without moving.

The air tastes metallic.

For a few seconds
everything holds itself strangely:

the grass,
the birds,
the breath inside my chest.

Nothing happens.

This is the worst part.

Nothing happens
and everything is about to.

Static is not noise.

Noise has somewhere to go.

Static is what remains
when movement cannot become meaning.

It is the hand
hovering above the doorbell.

The sentence
stopping one word before confession.

The photograph
where everyone is smiling
except the person who took it.

The little white scar
left by a spark
that lasted less than a second.

I used to think
the opposite of silence was speech.

I was wrong.

The opposite of silence
is everything we cannot stop hearing.

The refrigerator at night.

Blood inside the ear.

Someone breathing
on the other side of a wall.

Your own thoughts
returning with their fingerprints changed.

And underneath all of it,

that faint electrical insistence,

that almost,

that not-yet,

that something

trying to become
something else.

Maybe this is why
we fear stillness.

Because when the world finally stops,

we discover

it was never quiet.

It was only
waiting for us
to notice the static.