Episode 2: Stuffed Silence

Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing as well as you can. We didn’t have a submission this week, so today’s poem reflects something I’ve been thinking a lot about—something I deeply struggle with every day. And I know I’m not alone.

I’m pretty honest about my struggles with mental health, and I’m beyond grateful for everyone who emails, messages, and DMs me. But I also know that many of us—myself included—wrestle with responding. 

This week’s poem excavates the complicated nature of receiving and replying to messages from someone who knows we're struggling and is lovingly checking in on us. It unpacks the nooks and crannies of this dynamic—such as the tension between gratitude and somatic reactions—and why responding is not as simple as it seems. 

I’ll share it with you now:

I imagine your thumbs padding

against the bottom half of 

the glass screen, every

twenty-four hours or so.

Good morning! Just thinking of you. Hope all is well.

Hey, how are you feeling today?

Found this podcast, book, quote that I know you’ll love. 

This meme made me think of you!

Hey, just checking in. How are things?

If there’s any way I can help, let me know. Doesn’t matter what it is. I’m here.

Are you okay? Please let me know. I’m worried.

I’m impotent. Can’t generate letters, words, sentences, paragraphs,

but a bare-boned poem. 

Anxiety splashes and churns acid up the walls of my stomach

reading your worry.

Overwhelm casts cross, sweeping shadows against uncapacious chest walls

writing a response.

Panic squeezes breath & blood from my heartbeat—a bean crushed by knife face—

tapping send. 

Replying is binding now.

I’m afraid you’ll call the police

as the space between us 

swells, crowded with absence—

not an empty void.

The quiet, dark, decay, death—

all that we call silence because we choose not to

see, touch, taste, smell, or hear it—

claws for scraps of space.

“I'm drinking from my saucer,

'Cause my cup has overflowed.”

But blue bubbles and

buzzing and bells

combine into bulging balls—

suffocating and boiling the inside of my body—

harbingers of becalming.

Too much to explain what’s been going on.

Too much to recap. 

Too much to walk through the gates of continuous conversation—

the promise of chronic energy exchanges that

I can’t give or hold.

A cyclic subscription expecting currency that

my nervous system can’t expend. 

Breathe the words in. What do they make you feel or think? How did they connect with your senses? What colours or symbols did you notice? What meaning did you draw? Metaphors? Interpretations? Clarity? Messages?