Signal

Find you in the radio signal midday
somewhere midway down a
three-thousand-mile escape route,

find you crack of dawn McDonald’s
weak black coffee on the table weak
wifi in the air weak connection

in the notes we pass back and forth
like paper airplanes landing
on a dirty floor down where

we can’t reach, and what if
this time you stayed, what if
this time you didn’t come back,

what if all along we were
shouting over white noise on a
dead channel, whispering into the

waves of the Gulf of Mexico,
crashing on the beach and
dragged back out to sea

Chloe Bollentin is a writer and proofreader based in New Jersey, where she lives with her girlfriend and their miniature Australian labradoodle. She received her BA in classics from Smith College in 2015 and has spent the intervening years working in publishing and writing in her spare time. Her poetry will appear in the forthcoming edition of Blue Moon Literary & Art Review, and she is currently revising her first novel.