Phone Call From My Dead Brother
I feel him pulling in ways
he has not tugged before
the voice insistent on a distant line
pulling vaguely at my mouth, numbed cheek,
like a dentist extracting my voice.
I have entered phonebooths to reach
outward, to become real in the other place
hoping that my speech is an injection,
perhaps a defibrillator for the dead.
Still, we see each thing grow smaller,
voices whispering, growing fainter
on the swelling phone,
his voice watery down the line
fading, twisting in the drowning wire.