Shared Wall

1 Minute Read Time

This photograph shows a close-up to a brick wall, with darkness surrounding it.

                     Lacrimae rerum


Jarred from our half-sleeping, 
we hear its muffled chorus 
past words, past caring for us,

and think the sheetrock’s weeping. 
Shrill sighs, like a rusty piston.
We press an ear to listen—

the burst of a yowled report 
(our synapses misfiring
or the whining of old wiring)

dies down. How else interpret 
this noise next-door sings 
except as the yes of things?

Brian Brodeur

is the author of four poetry collections: Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), winner of the 2022 New Criterion Prize, Every Hour Is Late (2019), Natural Causes (2012), which won the 2011 Autumn House Poetry Prize, and Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize, as well as the poetry chapbooks Local Fauna (2015) and So the Night Cannot Go on Without Us (2007). New poems and criticism appear in American Poetry Review, Hopkins Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Brian is Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing with a Poetry Focus at Indiana University East.

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