Waiting for Room

<p>In waiting rooms and corner stores at kitchen tables and emergency room intake desks Rick Maderis maps the geography of survival. A teenager carries textbooks and bullet wounds. A diabetic counts carbs like rosary beads rationing insulin between paychecks. A father learns to count to ten between trigger and response. A former activist becomes a chocolatier transforming bitterness into something that nourishes. In the electrical silence of 3 AM kitchens voices whisper prayers too afraid to share with God.</p><p><em>Waiting for Room</em> explores the mathematics of choosing love when destruction writes itself so easily. But this is more than witness-it's intervention. In the final act Maderis steps into his own narrative confronting the voices that demand tragedy and choosing instead the radical discipline of hope. This is poetry that counts between seconds that refuses easy endings that dares to imagine survival as a shared language.</p><p>Sometimes that's enough to keep breathing. Sometimes that's everything.</p><p>Born in Hollister California Rick Maderis is a father founder and creative based in Portland Oregon. He writes from what survived the breaking and what gets built after-exploring the space between thunder and whisper too raw for small talk too necessary for silence. Author of <em>Until Silence Spoke</em> and <em>After the Last Echo</em> <em>Waiting for Room</em> is his third collection. #rickmaderis #maderis</p><p>Deep Cuts Records</p>