stenotype

by Ayelet Amittay

If speech survives 

a courtroom, unstruck

from the record, it is

broken, coded

as abbreviation: 22

keys, a ticker tape of white

margin space, no man’s

land where letters stand for

pause, punctuation

S T PH = question

mark in a topography

of neighbor keys. Your Honor,

may I approach

the bench to stand before the court

reporter, beg an alternate

ending? <Question> Surely

some repair can come to

this interstitial

brokenness:

missing consonants missing

I and why.

Ayelet Amittay is a poet and nurse practitioner in Oregon. Her poems have recently appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Whale Road Review, and others. She has received fellowships from the Yiddish Book Center and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.