Redaction

By Carmen Giménez Smith

We make dogma out of letter writing: the
apocryphal story
of Lincoln who wrote angry letters he never sent.
We wait for letters
for days and days. Someone tells me I'll write you
a letter
and I feel he's saying you're different than anyone
else.
Distance's buzz gets louder and louder. It gets to
be a blackest hole.
I want the letter about the time we cross the avenue,
and you reach
for my hand without looking—I am afraid I'm not
what you want.
We float down the street as if in the curve of a pod
and the starry black is like the inside of a secret.
We're drunk.
The streetlight exposes us which becomes the
deepest
horror. Yes. End the letter like that, so it becomes
authorless.
Then the letter might give off secrets: acid
imbalances that detonate.



**Note: Line breaks are supposed to include every other line being indented, but Blogger won't let me do that