Sylvia Byrne Pollack
The Deaf Woman at the Turn of the Year
The deaf woman stares into the navel of New Year’s Eve, picks out
the lint, tosses it into a pile of confetti, ready for midnight.
She watches from her upstairs window for bursts of red, blue and
white, spinning patterns high in the sky.
She wishes she were close enough to feel the ground shake like that
time in the summer of ’89 when Paris celebrated the 200th
anniversary of their Revolution.
Fireworks thundered, car alarms blared, tens of thousands of citizens
reveled in the streets, spilled into and out of the Metro.
Enthusiasms, unleashed, ran in packs, sank fangs into tourists,
frightened the natives, slobbered.
The deaf woman notices some of the same excessive exuberances in
her own native land, not the effervescence of champagne but
the caustic foam of fomenting lies.
The deaf woman wonders how long until a guillotine is erected on the
National Mall.
Sylvia Byrne Pollack’s work has appeared in Floating Bridge Review, Crab Creek Review, Clover, and Antiphon, among other journals. She is a recipient of the 2013 Mason’s Road Winter Literary Award, a finalist for the 2014 inaugural Russell Prize, and she was recently named a Jack Straw Writer for 2019. She is currently writing a series of “Deaf Woman Poems” inspired by Marvin Bell’s “Dead Man Poems.”
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