The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Dubious Breath by Jennifer Davis Michael

This selection, chosen by guest editor H.V. Cramond, is from Dubious Breath by Jennifer Davis Michael (Finishing Line Press 2022).

Dead Air

Steve Inskeep interviews a Chinese-American woman whose husband, a doctoral
student in Persian history, is mysteriously detained in Iran.

Three hundred marks on the wall,
hieroglyphs of hopeless time.
One daily hour of natural light,

a tricolored flag shadowing
the high-walled concrete yard.
The prisoners pace in circles, losing count.

Even when the phone line is pristine,
her loved one is a million miles away,
vanished, detained, forced to confess.

He cannot make a sentence,
cannot pronounce his sentence,
its duration twice his young son’s age.

The reporter asks the not-quite-widow,
“What was his voice like?”
allowing dead air

to hang like the delay
in a lagging phone connection.
“He cannot make a sentence,”

she says. “He was just crying.”
For a costly moment, the reporter
lets her silence be his silence,

and listening in my car,
I hold my breath,
their tears, our silences.

Jennifer Davis Michael grew up in Alabama, lived briefly in Oxford and Chicago, and has spent most of her adult life in Sewanee, Tennessee, where she is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of the South. Her academic specialty is British Romanticism, especially William Blake. Besides her scholarly monograph, Blake and the City (Bucknell, 2006), she has published two poetry chapbooks, both from Finishing Line Press: Let Me Let Go (2020) and Dubious Breath (2022). She is currently working on a full-length collection, Bodies at Rest.

H.V. Cramond holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was the founding Poetry Editor of Requited Journal for 10 years. In 2018, she helped pass the Survivor’s Bill of Rights in Illinois as an organizer for Rise. Read more of her writing on her website.