by Bill Ratner
If I could change my story I’d cry with my brother, ask him big questions, put on a blue serge suit and call a meeting. Let’s discuss, I’d tell him, dry up the ocean of grief, drain the aquifer of sadness, explode the mountain face of ghost flesh.
If I could change my story I’d pound a gavel on a big hardwood table and say here’s the Kleenex, cry if you need, the ancient language of wanting.
If I could change my story there’d be a carnival midway right next door, cotton candy, candy corn, slabs of valhrona chocolate, magic in my hand, and TV everywhere, cowboy movies.
Rat-a-tat guns would blow it all away when we needed sleep. We’d have jobs on the railroad and send freight trains a hundred-fifty cars long on every railway west, bigger than our ping-pong table, bigger than our town.
If I could change my story we wouldn’t have silence, except the good kind before a downbeat of jazz and the ting of crystal when I want attention.
If I could change my story we wouldn’t have the silence that meant we were all suffering, suffering in silence, our blood flowing in dark alchemy to quiet our tongues, quell our tears that would never make it to our eyes.
We wouldn’t have the helpless silence of doctors, the sound of nurse’s shoes like an airplane applying brakes on a runway.
If I could change my story I’d have a car so fast, so sleek, so loud, I couldn’t hear the silence any more.
Bill Ratner is a voice actor and author of poetry collections Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake (Slow Lightning Lit, 2024,) Fear of Fish (Alien Buddha Press, 2021,) To Decorate a Casket (Finishing Line Press, 2021,) Best of the Net Poetry Nominee 2023 (Lascaux Review,) and 9-time winner of the Moth StorySLAM. His writing appears in Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press,) Missouri Review (audio,) and other journals. billratner.com/author • @billratner
Emerge Literary Journal 