She sealed her letter with dabs of water
And mailed her heart to me.
In loops of ink
I wrote the same song
That neither of us could sing
To show her that we wouldn't work
Despite what her doctor thought.
Love was not a prescription
Whoever thought of that, well
It was fiction
A story that sold like cheap magazines
On the far aisles of the pharmacy.
But she sang back to me
Over the store speakers
That love itself wasn't pure.
It did not sit
On prescription shelves
With a safety seal that warned:
"Do not love
If this heart is broken."
Instead, it must be spoken
The words of forgiveness, raw and open
A language foreign to medicine.
It took a week and a half
For the post office to deliver
Each other's letters.
Email was impersonal
In person, more painful
So we wrote on paper
Waiting for our hearts to mend the other.
We are each other's doctors.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
YOU ARE READING
Cement City
PoetryHow to capture it all? I was no photographer My paint brushes, I have retired And words simply do not belong On a cover The same way they fit In my mouth, or march along the surface Of these pages. How to capture it all? The sounds, the smells, the...
