Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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Jan/Feb 2020 • Vol. XLII No. 1 |

I Can’t Hear You When You’re Screaming

line like a piece of twine, line like a piece of dry grass, plank, nail, a finger pointing there, a finger-shush, line like a cut sewn up, a rupture stitched, like a bicycle cutting snow, a game of telephone, line like a shift of cord between cans, mouth-to-ear-to-mouth-to-ear repetitions, a human-chain saving a driver from rush flood, a barrette, a strand of hair latched in, we are each of us from somewhere else, aloft for city miles the telephone wire, line like city avenue traffic, dotted-with-shit avenue where the horses have been, horses become beautiful noise, line like string tied to a balloon, string tied to a door handle tied to a tooth, every time there’s a boundary we must appoint the messenger to cross it, line like the space between a camera & the calamity, line like an X-rayed rib, like a track of menstrual blood down the thigh, parade spectator line, trombone slide, a column of air inside, a column of air with its spit-trap, I can’t hear you when you’re whispering, a sunwind line, a line of hair blown into the camera eye

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Carolina Ebeid was born in West New York, New Jersey, and is the author of You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior (Noemi Press, 2016). She holds a PhD from the University of Denver and has won fellowships from CantoMundo, the Stadler Center, the NEA, and a Lannan Foundation Residency. She helps edit poetry at the Rumpus.

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