Everything After Red

---

Certain endings become visible only in hindsight. They tend to favor the back door rather than the spotlight. Often, they begin with a pause that stretches too long, a glance that doesn’t return, or a sentence left unfinished.

There is no sharp turn and no sudden conclusion to mark the end. Instead, there is recognition that something meaningful has shifted and will not return. The departure is not marked by a clean break but by a subtle understanding: everything that remains now exists just out of reach. What settles in is not apathy, but a quiet acceptance, an honest sense that it is truly over and that what lingers no longer asks to be chosen.

This poem begins there—not in the heat of what was lost, but in the still place that follows.

---

Everything After Red
By: Kerry Ann Wiley

Lungful of ash.
No fire in sight.
Only the twitch of something unclaimed,
beneath a skin never asked to be worn.

The frame turns inward.
Softness learns how to brace.
Names fall away,
one, then another.
One catches on the tongue,
but the mouth closes around air.

What moved was not wind.
What stayed did not settle.
The sky folded at the corners
and split down the center.
No apology. Just red.

Somewhere, a question gives out,
losing its spine.
The answer lingers in the heat,
spoiled,
like meat left too long in the sun.

No reins.
No sea.
Only the sound
of a throat
choosing not to call it back.

---

This poem does not begin with heat or conflict. It begins in the quiet aftermath—where the fire has already passed. There is no promise of return and no path back to what once was.

From its opening breath, the poem offers only ash without flame—a stillness that settles in the absence of heat. What remains is stripped of sentiment.

Lines such as “the frame turns inward” and “softness learns how to brace” reflect what happens when explanation becomes too much to carry. These lines do not suggest surrender. Rather, they reveal a shift in stance. Softness does not disappear; it reshapes itself. Where clarity once came through language, now it arrives in the pause that follows.

The names come next; once familiar and tied to ordinary moments, they gradually begin to slip away. Even when one returns and “catches on the tongue,” it remains unspoken. Choosing not to say it is not about fear. It is about knowing that speaking it would only stir the ache. Some truths do not need to be voiced to be real. Letting them go can become an act of mercy.

The break arrives without warning. As the poem states, “The sky folded at the corners and split down the center.” This moment is not chaos and not collapse. It is an irreversible shift that occurs without permission or negotiation. The next line—’No apology. Just red.’—offers no clarity, no reassurance; only defiance. It names the wound as it is: raw, immediate, and beyond undoing. There is no metaphor here and no softened meaning—only finality, bare and unflinching.

Even the question begins to dissolve. “Losing its spine,” it slips out of shape. The answer—if it ever existed—rests somewhere in the heat, untouched. There is no attempt to recover it. The poem does not try to resolve what has been lost. Some things are meant to remain where they fall.

The ending doesn’t strike—it recedes, beginning in absence rather than force. The lines read, “No reins. No sea.” There is no path forward and no current left to carry anything away. The absence of reins suggests that there is nothing left to guide, no direction that can be forced.

Without the sea, there is no tide to wash anything clean and no movement to ease the weight of what has been lost. What remains is a single, quiet choice: “a throat choosing not to call it back.” That moment does not beg, and it does not break. It holds still. It reflects the strength to remain outside what has already ended—not from numbness, but from understanding that not everything is meant to be returned to.

Everything After Red does not attempt to make peace with what is gone. Instead, it honors the decision not to go after it. Some endings do not ask for closure; they ask to be left alone. Some truths do not need to be spoken twice. Sometimes, the clearest answer is the silence that follows.

The poem ends where most won’t linger: the aftermath. What is left can’t be salvaged, and what remains isn’t worth the reach. It does not circle back, and it does not feign resolution. It stands still—stripped bare, deliberate, and unflinching.

This is not a lament for what was lost, but an honest reckoning with the moment it no longer felt worth returning to. In that refusal, in that stillness, the poem makes its final mark—not through sound, but in the silence of all that remains unsaid.

---