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The mailbox exhales December~
a paper breath
of pine and cinnamon.
Each envelope,
a door left ajar:
inside, the hush of
inked sincerity,
fingers tracing the
embossed edges of
someone’s I thought of you.
No pixels, no ping~
just the slow
theology
of glue and stamp,
the quiet arithmetic
of distance measured
in cardstock.
I lay them on the table
like relics:
Here is proof~
we still reach
without
touching.
We all started life a sheath of blank pages
Able to be shaped into anything.
Paper aeroplanes, an artist’s canvas, a library book.
Our parents determine what kind of paper we are
-Cardstock, coloured tissue or plain white sheets.
As we grow, our friends, our families, our teachers
Etch the ink into us,
Page by page, letter by letter
Building up our childhoods.
We felt everyone knew better than us,
(and perhaps they did)
So, we obeyed, listened and absorbed everything
-morals, actions, behaviours-
Until attentiveness turned into reticence,
Til compliance became blind trust.
We trusted everyone by our sides, trusted what they said,
What they told us to do.
Until we realised we shouldn’t.
Nobody had ever showed us
The callous hands that tore instead of turned,
Ripping out our pages for their own.
Nobody showed us what it felt like
To have your story stolen,
To feel oneself drown beneath another’s ink.
Now I have just one question
How do I rewrite what was burned?
There is a glare of stray sunlight
daring to reverberate
through spiderwebbed glass I haven't
found energy to fix
in the span of four years.
It is too much of a mirror,
too tangible a thought,
to make new.
It's lithe fingers, thin and bony,
and mockingly bright,
steal over embossed cardstock that arrives, like clockwork,
in deepest sympathy.
And a thornless bouquet of pastels laden with
Babies Breath
only draws on blood long lost;
nobody seems to comprehend such an allegory,
or lack there of,
so it can't be carried
over the steps.
"Bloodless On Mother's Day"
Jenna-Nichole Conrad
Wordsmith
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