They Don’t Talk Much Anymore

By Ed Ahern

Their intimacy speaks in the unsaid. 
opposition unraised, disagreement stilled, 
stifled correction or contradiction, 
permission for those close to rest in the wrong 
while choke-chaining the harsher truths. 

Little silent helping things saying 
that courtesy is an inadequate term 
to explain the need to hold one another 
in loving stasis. 

Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had four hundred fifty stories and poems published so far, and seven books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he manages a posse of eight review editors. He’s also lead editor at The Scribes Micro Fiction magazine.