The Voice Before

Melody S. Gee

Echoes uncurl down this canyon
       like patient honey rolling. Rocks repeat
everything I say. A tree falls
                  as many times as I can hear it.

My body in shadows—misshapen
       echoes of light thrown
through cedars and ivory birch.
                  You are the body in my throat,

pitched into this low vein of earth,
       cast over bald stones, pierced
on tentacles of aloe, and gummed
                  in their heat-split stalks.

What was that voice before the voice released,
       the unheard body, the naked, shivering
idea of sound? What are you now, climbing toward
                  my mouth out of the canyon mouth,

surrounding me with screams of torn
       clover and broken shale, a body broken whole
from my teeth? I would lay out
                  the prairie of my tongue, my throat,

but you do not want return
       as I do. You have grown too thin
in the shape of air, in the sound of yourself,
                  for bodies anymore.

                  The first sound was an emptying.
The first return, departure.

CURRENT ISSUE
PAST ISSUES
SUBMISSIONS
CONTEST
ABOUT THE GR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

MELODY S. GEE lives in Indiana and teaches writing at Purdue University. Her work has appeared in Water~ Stone Review, Mississippi Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review and Zone 3, among other journals.

Her poem “The Voice Before” received The Greensboro Review’s 2008 Literary Prize for poetry.