Christopher Kondrich

RESIGNATION SYNDROME

I have redacted myself from the document of the world.
A black bar over the sentence of my body.
Where are days I have not eaten in them.
What are weeks I have not spoken.
To my family who shows me photographs that fall from my eyes
into a pile of unopened letters.
Even if I’m read the letters
I wouldn’t understand.
I have burrowed into a dead language
so I can live in the mouth of no one.
Because if no one has a feeling it is the sensation
of holding being taken from the hand.

CHRISTOPHER KONDRICH is the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press), selected by Jericho Brown for the National Poetry Series; and Contrapuntal (Free Verse Editions). New poems appear in The Believer, The Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, The Massachusetts Review and Witness. An associate editor for 32 Poems, he lives and works in Maryland.