Anthony Hanible

A Cry

A cry doesn’t begin in the throat

It begins in the glitch.

That tiny hairline shiver 

In the mind’s machinery where something 

Slips

Catches

Repeats

You feel it first as staticA faint buzzing behind the eyes

Like a memory trying to reboot

But loading out of order

Faces without names

Rooms without doors

Your own voice

Speaking from the wrong distance

Then the fracture widens

Thoughts misfile themselves

Time folds in the middle

You watch yourself

Watching yourself

Not holding it together.

A cry leaks through the cracks

Not a sound

But a distortion.

A warped frequency that bends the air around you

Makes the walls breathe

Makes the floor tilt

As if the world is reconsidering

It\'s agreement to stay solid

It drags old fears

Out of their locked drawers

But they come out wrong

Blurred at the edges

Stitched together

From pieces that never belonged

To the same night.

And when the cry finally breaks

Shuddering 

Involuntary

A collapse of all the versions of you

That couldn’t hold the line

It doesn’t echo

It multiplies.

It ricochets inside you

Like a thought you can’t unthink

A truth you can’t unhear

A fracture that keeps remembering

How to split