Mary Jo Salter

NOT ON SPEAKING TERMS

Walking through weeks and weeks
with a rock in the heart—
no, not the left side or the right
but the choked-up center,
the rock in the esophagus,
a rock I didn’t ask to eat
and cannot swallow
or spit out—

that’s what your law forbidding talk
feels like to me.
That’s what never hearing what
you’re not saying but
are thinking, in what I only guess
is a helpless whirligig of fury,
feels like to me:
an emptiness

like the absences in outer space,
but black-hole heavy.
Nothing is heavier
than this, the rock
that blocks me says;
don’t even try
crying it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair
into the unforgiving air.

MARY JO SALTER is the author of nine previous books of poems and a new volume, Casmeo Appearance (Penguin, 2026). Guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2024, she is a professor emerita at Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Baltimore.