Loadbearing
from A Dangerous Quiet
PREFACE
A Dangerous Quiet is built from what does not break. These poems trace the pressure that accumulates in stillness, in structures we trust, in choices we hold intact, in silences that bear more than they were meant to. Quiet is not empty space here. It is engineering. It is loadbearing. It is where danger lives.
Loadbearing Nothing collapses— but the walls know their limit, how plaster holds fracture like stress locked in bone. Cups stay where set, but their bases press faint rings into wood that remembers what heat does to grain. Doors learn their frames so well they curve to the gap, sealing it behind what we said. What carried the weight was never the shout— it was the quiet that calculated each step, the choice to leave rooms intact and hollow, to let the structure stand while everything inside corrodes. We lived in that engineering: spoke in syllables we measured, stored breath in drawers with the sharp things we hid. Ceilings taught us how much a body can suspend— how long flesh can bow before it buckles like floorboards under joists. Even now the floors do not fail. They bow, holding pressure. They memorise footfall as scars, redistribute years into the cracks we pretend are part of the design. Some silences are beams. They do not announce themselves. They stay— and with every passing hour, they tighten their grip on what they were built to bear.
END NOTE
Each poem in this series was written to sit at the edge of collapse, to hold its form while letting the weight show. The language leans into the precision of the built world because our lives are engineered as much as they are felt. Floors memorise us, walls know their limits, and some silences do not release what they take.
For all who have lived inside the quiet that carries everything.
© 2026 L. O. Campbell. All rights reserved.
Morning Laurie, Nothing breaks, but everything remembers.I can almost feel the rooms holding their breath.
i am really diggin this one