Emily Franklin

Phone Booth to the Dead

Someone hung a rotary telephone 
on a tree in Olympia Washington deep
in the forest where another someone walking

to forget or to remember might happen
upon the old technology and pick up
the plastic receiver, cradle it between

neck and ear, trying to recall someone’s
number, their face in mid-laugh or when
that person was not the stuff of forest

memories and in Otsuchi, Japan there is a phone
box they call phone of the wind erected
for use by those who grieve, those who want

to connect and place a call—did you memorize
the number? Just whose digits have you
committed to memory, do you carry with you

like the feel of their upper lip or the scent of neck,
or hair, aliveness in summer or their ending in autumn—
and all at once we walkers are remembering the phone

with its coiled cord built for stretching to another room
for privacy, tangled intestinal loops, and we are grasping
for someone at the other end of the line as though 

it would not be enough—could not simply be
enough—to shout up to the trees, to the sky itself
come back, where are you, please answer.