I feel nailed, hammered in. Craven. I do not know the dictionary definition of the word but it's the word I want to describe the pain I feel when a sob causes my shoulders to pinch in, makes my chest concave with the blow of dismissal. Craven. Probably the wrong word.
I wrote a letter to Bill Clinton when I was in the fourth grade. He wrote back, with his rubber-stamped signature. My mother had the letter laminated. I didn't know it; I thought it was a plastic pocket for the letter, so I could still take it out and touch the fancy paper. I peeled apart the plastic, thinking it was like a zip-lock bag, but the paper adhered and split in two revealing a chasm of dry, tree pulp. I'd ruined it. I yelled at my mother. She blamed my ignorance.
I felt spite toward her, toward "You don't know." I think it's because I did know, I knew what I'd done to the letter, rent it in it's mangled laminate package. I knew what that felt like. I knew I'd wanted a frame, the possibility of exit from the slim place between two panes of glass, anything but stagnant.
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This is great. For it to work as a prose poem, however, I would take out the traditional narrative structure. You can still discuss the same things - craven, the letter, how you felt, but I would rearrange it a bit, or at least slow down on certain parts - like how it felt to peel back the lamination. I am just afraid the end feels too much like an end of a short story or something, I would prefer it to be more open ended.
ReplyDeleteReally, though, this is beautiful. It has a lot of potential.