“Jubilee Writes to Ten-Cent Pearl on the Ambassador Motel’s Complimentary Stationary” by Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008Fall 2007, Volume 31, Number 2
What a sad winter, my God! What a sad winter! An orange petticoat hangs a pink dust cloth and it’s raining.
- Miltos Sachtouris
Recalling how whole Cincinnatis slept while we wandered around in the so-late-it-was-early-again new snow smother of January. January, cold to the bone, January. I confided I know he’s left town because the city feels like a collapsed lung. I pointed to the tree in the row of trees needle-bare and paired off with streetlights as if they were waiting for a square dance to begin. I was there when I knew he’d be in the corner store. I was there, then I felt him before I saw him.
You talked about the novelist, the one you’d written a hundred poems or more for and on St. Valentine’s Day I’ll see you talking to him and your face will look like a young girl face-open and hopeful as your name, Pearl. But I grow ahead of myself now. Because it’s still January and the street is as stopped and serene as a snowglobe village and there’s no one wide awake as we are and we’re laughing like we might have laughed before Eve found a tree not dissimilar to this and before she or God or the whole world bit us and before we learned to bite back. I’m alone now, Pearl. Alone the way you are after you find what you love most in the world and then lose it. I’ve lost it, Pearl. Cities and scripts and they’re asking me to make them laugh, my Lord, isn’t that a riot, though?
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