What Adam Did After the Fall

by Karyna McGlynn

He talked. He talked at me for three years straight but I learned very little.
He covered me in a glass mulch of words until
I couldn’t speak and, eventually, couldn’t hear.
I was an incoherent bed of occasional glimmers.
I was static pink blossoms on a decorative tree.
And I thought I understood then:

                                                            Oh, I’m dying.

I grew hard as a reed and every day poled my silent barge
across his river of syntax. One day he was waiting on the shore
with the headstone he’d made for me. It said

                                    “Karyna McGlynn: she checked her e-mail.”

He thought he could irritate me into a conversation about the death
of our intimacy. But I just stood on my silent barge,
motionless in the middle of the river.

                                    “But why?” he cried. “Why? Why? Why?”

I lay down and listened to his distant bleating. I thought he was the lost lamb.
I would not be moved.