Experience the Wealth of Fabulous Writing 


 

 
VOICE

 “All I have is a voice.”
― W.H. Auden[i]

I’ve lost my voice. Maybe it lies buried in the specter of a river that drives

its long skeletal gauge across boundaries, hidden in the skin of summer,

under the burning fires of a city, standing half full of visible darkness or

light or neither – a papier-mâché model, collapsing into the plated grey

of printed walls, frescoes bulleted, marbled with blood and the aerosol

of graffiti, my voice crawls in the pinholes and dust of their standing.

My voice is grit, my voice is bird departure, it is the low hum of a mid-

afternoon falling on dead bodies, my voice is a broken harmonica

under rubble, my voice is costumed in foreign syntax, furred in wintered

words, my voice is the rutted earth –once it smelt of cooking oil, bread,

white jasmine, the flannelled orange of your pajamas. It was a good voice,

it is yours if you want it? (yours to sell when I find it – in this stoned vista

missing of water, abandoned by fish, discarded like a cigarette, still lit–   


By: Agnieszka Studzinska



Voice by Agnieszka Studzinska Copyright Reward Publishing 2020