Grief, the poem suggests, is a problem of translation: how do you turn a private devastation into something loud, bright or powerful enough to matter? Q.R. Quasar's "Merging into Traffic on the Freeway of Screams" never says whose death it mourns. Instead it circles one idea. Pain can be shouted, multiplied and amplified, but the loss of a single life stays exactly the size it was.
The opening is a run of impossible questions. How do you "unlock the core of radiance" when "the shine just streams on by you"? How do you "pry open the rainbow's spectrum" when the colors "untwine and gyre / in the desert dull dust devils"? The sound does as much work as the sense here. The hard, clipped d's of "desert dull dust devils" make the light seem to choke on grit. The most unsettling image comes last: trying to "inlay the jeweled light / in the dead squid's eyes." The verb is the language of a jeweler setting a stone, and the object is something glassy and lifeless. Beauty is being pushed into a place where it can't take hold. The stanza then turns on a small, stubborn pair of lines: "you know you can't / but you can't stop trying anyway." Those plain words, after all the glittering ones, sound like the real confession.
The second stanza brings in Lazarus, the dead man called back out of his tomb. The speaker steps out from behind the "you" and admits, "if once I had the scream to do it, / I no longer have it today." So the scream is more than noise. It is a kind of power, the cry that might undo a death, and the speaker feels it has gone.
From there the poem builds its central conceit, the "freeway of screams." Quasar enjoys the wordplay. Voices "merge into traffic," as if grief had become a commute. There is "no fast lane," and the wails "crawl at snail's pace / out of our mouths." The pace is odd, because screams should be instant, and the oddness is the point. In a crowd of cries, each one is slowed and blurred and loses its individuality. Even the physical detail is strange. The wails "take off horizontally / up the shriekway," a plane taking off along the ground. The line is funny and bleak at once, since the cries seem to rise without ever leaving the road.
The form helps. There is no rhyme and no fixed meter, and every line begins in lowercase, which gives the poem a breathless, unpunctuated feel. The long, dash-interrupted lines of the freeway section, like "there is no fast lane on the freeway of screams—", seem to idle in the traffic they describe. Then the poem speeds up and breaks "the sound barrier," and the noise gives way to its opposite. "All that will be left / will be a living mouth, open / in the Emil Nolde oval model / of a mouth in the silent scream." The poem invokes a painter, Nolde, an Expressionist, and the stretched oval of an open mouth. Judging by the imagery, the idea is that a scream pushed far enough becomes silence, a mouth still open after the sound has gone. "Living" is the sharpest word in the stanza, because it quietly sets the survivor against the dead.
The closing three lines drop the extended metaphor and speak plainly: "all the decibels in the world / will never make up for—or drown out— / the anguish of one death." After so much talk of traffic and volume, the poem sets the whole roaring freeway against a single loss. "One" is the weight-bearing word. The poem's logic of crowds and noise says that more voices should mean more force, but grief does not add up that way, and the ending refuses the arithmetic.
That refusal is what makes the poem worth reading. It speaks to a world full of noise, where outrage and mourning can be shared instantly and endlessly, and it asks whether volume is the same as meaning. Its answer is not cynical. The speaker "can't stop trying anyway," and the poem is itself a scream, one that has learned to be exact.