When the Dead Call

When the phone rings in early morning hours, the Dead

wait on the line for you to pick up, not a care

in the world except to hear your sleepy voice

tinged with anticipation. They know a call at this time

stirs memories of dark notifications, or drunk

sisters slobbering over spent lives.

Your quickened pulse now lives

beneath your breath as you answer the dead

phone:  Hello, hello.  It’s 2 a.m., when your drunk

sister used to call and pretend she could still care

for your welfare. Fuck you, you thought time

and time again, yet never said. Instead, your voice

soothed, renewed, tried to pull her real voice

out of the earpiece to recall the lives

you shared, four years apart, growing up in a time

some call innocent. That girl might as well be dead.

Anxious to be a married woman, she only cared

how to keep her man, mirroring his own drunk

state, to survive or what? Share the bond drunks

share when they can only hear each other’s voice?

So when the Dead call in the morning hours, they care

whether you say hello or whether silence now lives

in the bigger part of your heart. You see, the Dead

who call include your father, heart run out of time

and gone with a 4:00 a.m. call you expected in time

to forget, but never did. So the fact you speak, drunk

with fear, says you have not forgotten, though he’s dead.

Instead, your ears echo with his supportive voice,

the one he used when you sacrificed all nine lives

coming out to your mother and he gifted you with care.

You could not pretend you didn’t care                      

what words this woman spewed as she turned time

back to claim you never added to her life.

If you’d been inclined, you would have drunk

yourself numb that day, but the voice

of your father rang through: It’s alright.  The Dead,

or those who drain you of care, enter the shadows like drunks

from a side alley, asking you the time. You give them voice

by remembering their lives. They hover near, never fully dead.

Janice Dabney