Svetlana Litvinchuk

If music is the sound between the notes IV

In my childhood home, on either side
of every shouting match was a silence
my family called music, where my father
strummed an invisible guitar that only
I could see—red and covered in thumbprints.
His hand was always around its neck and,
unlike me, the guitar still learned how to sing.

Years later, I saw myself on camera singing
to my daughter. My mouth was small
as a bird’s—only room for one word at a time,
but enough for her. Today I know home
as a place of miracles, where every silence
somehow manages to rhyme.

I think every song is a hymn we perform
in hopes of getting something right in this life,
so I never perform my father’s music. To recreate
it would require bookending it with violence,
whether turned inward or outward. He always
believed brutality is the hidden cost of making
something beautiful.

But on quiet mornings, when I rock my daughter
back to sleep, I find myself remembering how when
he stumbled home and the sun glinted off his glass
eye, the air was filled with birdsong made by a thing
that only knew peace on either end of its music.

Svetlana Litvinchuk is the author of a poetry chapbook, Only a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024) and a forthcoming full-length poetry collection, Navigating the Hallways by Starlight (spring 2026). Nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, and a finalist for the Slippery Elm Poetry Prize, her poetry appears in ANMLY, swamp pink, About Place, Strange Horizons, Rust + Moth, Sky Island Journal, Arkana, and elsewhere. She is the Managing Editor of ONLY POEMS and a Guest Editor for Rockvale Review in 2025. Find her on Instagram @s.litvinchuk and www.svetlanalitvinchuk.com