Where the Sound Doesn’t Settle

---

Distance begins with omissions:
a question unanswered,
a word withheld,
a silence recorded but unacknowledged.

Alone, they appear intact.
Together, they fracture.

---

Where the Sound Doesn’t Settle
(a poem)

By: Kerry Ann Wiley

An opening without promise—
forever ajar, forever closed.

Inside, warmth ripples;
voices flare and scatter,
shards of sound that never settle.

Where presence bleeds into the silence
of what’s left unspoken—
forever ajar, forever closed.

Denials accumulate—
layer on layer,
a gravity of refusal.

Those kept apart wear glass:
a second skin of shimmer.
Each gesture bends the light—
visible, unreachable,
radiant, discarded.

Not all distance is glass.

To cross is to risk shattering.
To remain is to erode.
Absence pools beneath the skin—
an ache that mimics touch.

The body remembers what the mind denies:
a warmth once near,
a voice once heard,
fingers tracing the spine like scripture, now unwritten.

A spark insists—
unyielding, unsummoned,
burning because it must.

Not all distance is sudden.
Sometimes it gathers quietly,
until what was once easy becomes strained.

The silence is not absence,
but an accumulation of things withheld, deflected, deferred.

What remains is not the loss of words
but the fracture in their landing:
the sound that never settles.

The final spark does not simply continue.
It endures—
stubborn against silence,
fierce against fracture.

Even when words fail.
Even when connection frays.

What hurts most is not silence itself—
but the echo that tries to reach us,
and never quite arrives.

---

Closing

The static grows.
Neither signal nor silence—
only echo.