Something’s off-balance
in the air, throbbing me
unclear.

I spoke softly,
plainly, yet we parted
lonely as dusk.

Silence occupied your ears.

Other eyes slid past me,
spent no notice,
or held so slow

I longed to disappear.

Little birds on roadside stalks
rise and shiver to a mist,
shying me to tears.

Carol L. Deering has lived in Wyoming for 30+ years. She has twice received the Wyoming Arts Council Poetry Fellowship (2016, judge Rebecca Foust; 1999, judge Agha Shahid Ali). Her poetry appears in online and traditional journals, recently in Written River and forthcoming in Soundings Review.