Grief makes its home in silence and idleness
I turned silences and nights into words
And from time to time look’d up in perfect silence at the stars
What you observed was only silence
Which speaks verbosely of its own silence
So instead she drowned in silence
Silence is all we dread
That swells with silence in the tortured soul
Silence is the cruelest of cruelties
And secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed
Since I lost you I am silence-haunted
But my tongue is frozen in silence
My ears have the lids of a silence
The hours change clothes in silence
Tall treasurehouses, moonmaidenly silence
I catch the pattern of your silence
In the sweet white silence of your cells
The roar and silence of a vast electric shock
A few hours into cradling ourselves to silence
She climbed into the silence with him, staying there, feeling its soft curves
Not wanting it to go back to the secret silence of just a few hours before
Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal
Your silence will not protect you
But the silence provides no shelter and the wildness catches up to them
Silence about a thing just magnifies it
Silence is oppression, is violence
We insist on silence
Have yearned and died in silence
Her own voice, but not from her throat, spears the silence
She soaked up the silence, drunk it like the freshest whale milk
The one word, then silence
Silence. Its head flopped back
Silence. Without a name, you may not speak
When the soldiers entered the gay ward and beat them into silence
Nobody trusts silence
No stony silence in the media, only a little sunlight and frowning
No music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence
Nor strength to praise, only defeat and silence
Unrelenting oratory and then a golden silence
Instead I weaponize my silence, learn to fear my family
His loudest sound is a giant silence
I still knelt at the feet of the silence pooling
The round silence of night, one note on the stave of the infinite
Then there’s the silence that comes back
They had silences, at last, that were almost crudities of mutual resistance
Only some kind of breaking off, like the abrupt silencing of a tune
I’ve been suffering through that in silence because it feels too banal to bitch about
The silence goes on for a really long time, but probably not, like, that long
You must learn to live alone in silence
To live in chosen silence and darkness
This silence in the year since my mom died
Shrill gorgon silence breathes behind
The short season between two silences
The silence other than the living song
Silence is mocking the dawn of a new day
Silence, silence I don’t hear
In a sudden trough of silence
In silence to the ground
The god’s silence has fallen on every house
The silence strong enough to carry back the music to its source
Your silence is too loud for this noisy place
These eyes, each a knife. Silence shrinks me
Does silence choke speech or does it not
____
This is a collage of lines and phrases from works by writers and musicians who are understood by many to be in the queer community.
Lines in order come from:
Jacqueline Koyanagi
Arthur Rimbaud
Walt Whitman
Samuel Delany
Michel Foucault
Chi Ta-wei
Emily Dickinson
William Shakespeare
Roxane Gay
Oscar Wilde
D.H. Lawrence
Sappho
Matsuo Takahashi
James Merrill
Suniti Namjoshi
Langston Hughes
Paul Verlaine
Allen Ginsberg
Asa Akira
Akwaeke Emezi
Selena Kitt
James Baldwin
Audre Lorde
Robert Jones Jr
Tennessee Williams
Adrienne Rich
June Jordan
Alain Locke
Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Rivers Solomon
Patricia Highsmith
Nalo Hopkinson
Ng Yi-Sheng
Reinaldo Arenas
Nikki Giovanni
John Ashbery
Marcel Proust
H.D.
Elizabeth Bishop
Britteney Black Rose Kapri
Binyavanga Wainaina
Franny Choi
Federico Garcia Lorca
Ada Limón
Henry James
Emma Donoghue
Torrey Peters
Imogen Binnie
William Burroughs
Janet Mock
Thomas Page McBee
Robert Hayden
Virginia Woolf
Jude Sierra
Marc Bolan
Cardi B
Nalo Hopkinson
Anohni
Marlon James
Hart Crane
Koleka Putuma
Alexander Chee
Gertrude Stein
NOAH BERLATSKY (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. He's had chapbooks published at above/ground press, LJMcD Communications, and the Origami Poetry Project. He has a collection forthcoming from Ben Yehuda press. He tweets too much at @nberlat and scribbles longer at Everything is Horrible.