Today’s children will never know
what it was like to hear, from outside,
the sound of the telephone’s ring
inside the house: that persistent bell,
regular, plaintive, and how you’d
have to run to the door, perhaps
up some steps, open the latch, turn
the doorknob—all this time the phone
ringing, urging you to hurry,
from its sedentary spot on a table
or a wall—and how sometimes
you’d pick up the handset just in time
to talk to your grandmother or your
best friend, or a secretary reminding
you of your dental appointment;
but often, the ring would cease
its beckoning before you answered
so that you would hear not a friendly,
human voice but the vacant hum
of the dial tone, an accusation about
your lack of haste and the mild
recrimination that told you
someone called, you cannot know
whom, and you did not answer.
Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection (2024) is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, One Art, Ekphrasis Review, and many others, as well as in numerous anthologies. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at www.annemichael.blog
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