THIS IS HOW I GOT RID OF MY STUTTER

Sara once found a dead man hanging
behind the university library
and I’ve been pretending to
converse with him ever since.

We have chats through the whites
of our eyes,
but mine are not real enough.

The creaking floor in the kitchen
always comes from me.
I haven’t bothered to give him a name because
no vowels will ever sound right enough.

Man made from consonance; constant figurine.

I’ve decided to take him in
even if I’ve never seen him myself.
Me and my dead-man-friend
are always on a stage together.
This is a silent play; this is an action film.

The man watches me walk to my balcony, hops on the roof,
zooms in on my business at the grocery store.

All I know is that he is dead, he is a man,
grown into this hanging.
Then I chose to make it my business.

This is what we do with the dead:
pick them up, use them as floss between our teeth.

Let me always speak with
my accented grief;
It’s how I got rid of my stutter.

Grey-Denialist

My grief has become masturbatory:
all of our endings have come already.

We never spoke inside language. Bones exposed. It
wasn’t sound falling out our mouths, but paintings;

fully-formed and directional. We were only definitive strokes,
holding no time for sitting in the grey.

Noah Sparrow is a Montreal-Tiohtià:ke based writer and a Leafs fan regardless. He recently won the Gabriel Safdie Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize and the 2025 International Metatron Poetry Prize. You can read more of his poetry in Scrivener Creative Review, LBRNTH, and elsewhere; or his prose in The Fiddlehead. Find him at noahsparrow.com