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With appreciation to Poet/Writer Sherwood Ross

Voices After Death

By Sherwood Ross © 2009

The voices of the murdered ones live on after them on their answering machines.

 “I can’t come to the phone right now but I do want to talk to you!”  

Maya’s low, self-assured voice deceived me for two days while I traveled in Norway.

 It was not until I read the wire story: “Artist slain in San Francisco”

That I learned a man slashed her throat with a knife in a parking lot.

 It was not even an attempted robbery.  It was just like that.

“Please leave your name and phone number after the tone”

Maya’s voice continued as if nothing had happened.

I called the AP. There had to be some error.

Maya kept repeating, “I do want to talk to you.” How could it be true?

Flying home, I thought once I saw her face in the clouds, really saw it.

When I got to her studio everything was the same

Her paintings covering the walls, the complete and the incomplete

Brushes, tubes, splotches of paint dried out on the oaken tables,

Rumpled quilts on the day bed by the television she watched until all hours.

I removed her answering tape for a remembrance

Then thought, No, let others hear her voice, and replaced it.

I took my few shirts out of her closet and was about to leave when

I spotted another man’s shoes by her bed. My heart began to hurt.

It beat in my cheeks and forehead. I sat on the bed for a long afternoon.

Well, what did it matter after all?

My hand was on the doorknob when the phone rang.

It was a call from her drug dealer. Oddly, I no longer hated him.

Maya told him: “I can’t come to the phone right now.” I closed the door.

The Chickasaw Plum  -  Volume VI - Number 11 - November 2009

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