I Learned the Language of Barbs and Sparks No One Spoke | Shamala Gallagher

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Shamala Gallagher was born in San Jose, California to a South Indian mother and Irish-American father. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, Verse Daily, VOLT, Copper Nickel, Waxwing, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, and she has worked as a case manager for homeless families in San Francisco and HIV+ individuals in Austin. She lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

 

 

Echo Chamber Named Family

 

 

They made children. They made sense to each other for a while

But after that so many wrong years in the long clean quiet hall

Of the new country where they made money and were safe

 

                                                     

From nearly everything from which the rich are safe

But not from the blank growing lull like a white balloon

Inside and pressing terribly on the chest walls

 

 

Not from the sick boredom coded in them... not its grin

With air rushing through teeth. Not what sits up suddenly in the inner

Throne and eyes you and thinks up twisted visions

 

 

Of the steering wheel wrenched off as you hurtle

Down the street’s anonymous coalshine

And not from the senseless form

 

 

Bedstalled beside you speaking only

In the snorts and mumbles of the dumb legs and trunk