Dear ____________ful,
The lucky come when most convenient, as do seashells to the sea. You care about the fall, whereas I the falling. For instance, when the muffler fell off my car and onto the street, I cradled the rusted hollow like a dying pig. My father accused me of leaving him the second I was born, that I'd fallen the same way. The mechanic said, Unrepairable. I picked at the blister on my thumb, the newing skin beneath marking me older. What kept growing I wasn't sure.
Yours,
____________Ful
-Esther Lee
courtesy of Five Fingers Review 23... stunning (sigh).
these texts are an archive of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area from march 2007 - march 2015. it stands as a record of close to a decade of my life, charting the struggles i faced as an artist, daughter, and lover. messy and chaotic at times, eloquent and poetic at others, these texts are an index i am proud of. it was here in this electric box that i learned how to be honest about my experiences and the person i needed to become. it was here that i first learned the truism that words make the world and how to trust such a beautiful, rife, hard fact.
2 comments:
Quite thought-provoking! I'm not sure what I think of "_____Ful." It's definitely intriguing. What do you fill in the blank with?
she's got a whole series of poems like this that start with the big blank and all of them are wonderful.
i usually fill this one in with "beautiful" and "ungrateful". how bout you?
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