HER DECIBELS

I cried after computing her decibels
of what must have been a petite thud
that morning,

figuring in the time difference for her father on the coast,
whom she saw in credits that rolled at the end –
he painted sets.

And then I subtracted the date when she’d dropped
out of school to work with her sister
at an art deli back in Detroit,

drawing fast caricatures of men in suspenders that got hung on a wall,
their big smiles all made to look like they got away with something
in the end.

Her talented fingertips shaded the edges with the lightest of strokes, smoothing
things over, brushing hair back loosely from the face
out of the way.

Everyone mentioned what a knack she had for positioning the carriage of the head,
always stilled, nearly regal, with a perfectly captured look of something kept quiet,
before she handed it over.

COMPLEXITIES

That clacking nonsense, hard count
crickets and Sandhill Cranes, cicadas –
the night scat of what should have been said.

Ah, the wind chimes… quite uninvited, never taken down.
I could have borrowed a ladder, I suppose. They suspend with
simplicity, a hook-and-eye under the short shed roof of the porch,
a cover if somebody pushes the doorbell switch
then stands there on a rainy night, waiting.

Ken Been’s writing is published or forthcoming in journals internationally. His work can be found in LIT Magazine, The Primer, Slab, New Croton Review, The Brussels Review, The Opiate, and Aethlon, among others. His work also can be found in anthologies including Remembering Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Remembering Gerald Stern. Ken is from Michigan.