Echo
Hear my voice from under water
Calling to you with the sea in my throat
And moon bloomed sky above us
I wonder what it is you heard
Immersion in the unknown
Little pressure to rise back to the surface and confront what needs to be said
I wish nothing had to be said
There’s a glimmer on the lake
Reminding me of camp stories and broken memories sent into the depths
The past left undisturbed
But my truth is bubbling out and I can’t stop the spur of the moment
Flash flood and flowing
You make me think I’m understood
But you didn’t hear “I love you”
Just some garbled words
toy race cars
I woke up to the sound of a car in my dorm room
The way my brother would unload all of his toy corvettes from his back pack and line them up neatly in a row before pushing them one by one down the spiraling track in his bedroom
There must have been hundreds of them
Each echoing its metallic scrape throughout our house
with its construction paper as walls
I could hear everything so clearly
And I hope he is doing that now
Pretending that he is point A at the top
And I am point B at the bottom
And he is driving towards me indefinitely
Over and over again
Until he finally reaches
tattle tale heart
The tell-tale heart or
The tattle tale heart
Why must we always give a name to our pain
Instead of waking up in the morning with no one to blame
And nothing to remember
Amanda Pendley is a twenty-year-old writer from Kansas City. She has previously worked as an editor for award winning teen literary magazine Elementia. Her work has appeared in publications of Scholastic, Ramona Magazine, Lithium Magazine, and many others. Through her writing she hopes to uplift voices that have previously gone unheard and create a safe space for fellow authors, artists, and readers to be encouraged to open themselves up to what the world has to offer.