Donald Illich

Mouse Voice

The phone gave you to me.
It pulled a hundred voices
over a line and left me yours.
What did it say? Nothing
I wanted to hear. A death laugh,

a creaky plea for understanding
when it had given me none.
I imagined you falling back
on your bed, which turned
into a grave. In my thoughts

you squeezed your brain, nothing
came out but blasts of air.
Eventually, it was time to lay
down the receiver, to listen
to it continue its mouse voice,

squeaking inside its own maze.
The rest of the night I walked
in the park near my house, singing
loud enough for neighbors to hear,
who dropped phones on the floor

to listen to the sweetest music
any of them had ever heard.
It was nicer than the operator’s speech,
or lovers’ who wanted to know
if they were still there.

Copyright by Donald Illich 2018

Donald Illich’s work has appeared in literary journals such as The Iowa Review, LIT, Nimrod, Passages North, Rattle, and Sixth Finch. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received a scholarship from the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference. He won Honorable Mention in the Washington Prize book contest and was a “Discovery”/Boston Review 2008 Poetry Contest semifinalist. Gold Wake Press named his full-length manuscript a finalist during their 2015 open reading. He self-published a chapbook, Rocket Children, in 2012, and published another chapbook in 2016, The Art of Dissolving (Finishing Line Press). His full-length manuscript, Chance Bodies, will be published in 2018 by The Word Works. He is a writer-editor who lives and works in Rockville, Maryland.

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