Delilah Silberman

DRAMA

Afternoon occurring
before I can even focus on what I’m saying, I
can’t. I’m not saying it.
Dare I try? To
explain while you have your palm on my left shoulder,
facing me, a
gesture. Jesse

had to kiss me. Otherwise, he would go back to school and be a liar. He’d do
it alone for that reason.
Just ask. He put his Scholastic writing medal around my neck: Like this, now you
know how it feels to be a winner. We were
less or
more fifteen. I didn’t know about that, but I knew around my 

neck. Necessary for necessary. Downstairs, he flipped himself upside down, legs hanging
over his
pull-up bar to kiss me at an angle. I didn’t have
questions I should have had
ready. 

Sometimes I looked at him at school and he looked away.
There, he lied. He told me we were private
underneath his house, but as a character he shared it in acting class, then as himself. 

Very private, I’ve always been. I keep my secrets mostly
within other people. Within me, I have a big
X that marks the box that within me I cannot find.
Yes, there is a box. A necessary silence. Mr. Shiffman with his monologue assignment and his
zeal for our recitations of Spoon River: One died in shameful child-birth. One of a thwarted love.
One at the hands.

DELILAH SILBERMAN is a writer from Brooklyn. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and works as a tutor and editor. Her poems appear in Conjunctions, Poetry Daily, and Washington Square Review.