Her beauty existed in the heart-felt manuscripts
She collected in old shoe boxes
That she kept stowed underneath her bed
Dated and labeled in tidy little rows
The letters inside tucked securely
Into pretty scented envelopes
Stamped and addressed only to “Emily”
No destination printed underneath
The notes were written on fine linen paper
With a calligraphy pen
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Deep rich ink spilled onto
Bone-colored paper
Her letters leaned elegantly to the right
Like flowers tilted toward the sun
These unmailed confessions
Could not be delivered
Her unborn child existed
Only in the tangled memories
Of her devastated heart
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Underneath her fragile pen
She told the story of her life
Without embellishment or justification
Her darkest secrets smudged and diffuse
Pale grey puddles wept through to the other side
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Each day she unraveled the world as she understood it
In painstaking detail she recounted
Not just her disheveled childhood
But the collected experiences of her day
She described the barren apartment in which she lived
The streets where she worked and the men she labored under
The New York horizon, the first time she saw stars
The butterflies in the park she drew
In with colored pencils around the perimeter
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Occasionally she stuffed photos inside
Some pleasing and amusing like the doves
That perched outside on the fire-escape
Fighting over pieces of stale bread
Some almost too painful to look at
Like the scars that ran along her narrow back
In barbed-wire imitation
Sometimes too she stuffed items into the creased pages
Crushed flower petals and four-leafs clovers
There were cards for birthday and holidays
Filled from top to bottom with heavy crippled letters
Birthday cards nearly unreadable
Soaked strait through with black tears
mindlovemisery 