Quiet by Zachary Forrest y Salazar

Me, howling to the moon all my secrets. My father howling back.

Quiet

by Zachary Forrest y Salazar

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I must be one of the quietest animals on earth.
Maybe a sloth or a giraffe, maybe a rabbit.
When I look out my hotel window at Vientiane,
I think about my life as a child. My memories so very quiet,
like Kansas countryside, fields of milo and soybean and wheat.
My father never speaks in them. And I never speak in them.
When I moved out at eighteen, my father, frightened, said
the world was hard and I’d probably need to come home.
My father spoke in challenges—so I moved farther and farther away—
both in the distance between us and what I believed.
I find the world so very different from what he claimed—
nāga and buddhas, tuk-tuks and diesel—
Christ, nowhere to be seen or found.
The stray dogs wandering the street,
somehow survive and ask
when I can’t ask for anything—not my wife, for her body
or my father, for him to call. When I saw butterflies
in the Buddha Garden alight from bougainvillea
to bougainvillea, whispering small secrets to the flowers,
I whispered too, quiet like a song or chant—
Om Mani Padme Hum. And in my next life, I pray to have a father
who loves me. I ask for the wherewithal to speak up.
To be a lion or Coqui frog—a cicada, a howler monkey, maybe a wolf.
No more whispers or small prayers or opinions you can’t hear.
Me, howling to the moon all my secrets.
My father howling back. My father howling back. My father howling back
to the whole world how much he loves me.