a rustling of love letters
by Alex Simand
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I have a shoe box of knickknacks and love letters under my bed. turkey feathers. bandannas with maps printed on them. watercolors of song lyrics. little fossils of affection. they’re growing dust motes like mohawks spurting from their scalps and a bundle of spurned kitten fur and I wonder if I’m a neglectful father or if I should toss them into the trash next to last week’s lasagna. why do we keep these little trinkets of past loves? do we betray our futures by keeping truncated tokens of adoration within arms reach? I don’t know. I don’t know most things, but least of all of all this.

the last time I moved apartments, the box spilled out and I stood agape at the flood at my feet. arms spread with helplessness. I couldn’t scoop it up any more than I could hold a puddle in my palm. what do I do with every feeling I’ve ever had? what does it mean to have collected the sand from a beach for another person? there it was, spilling out of the topless jar that held, seeping into the hardwood, becoming hardwood, fading it, softening it, filling it with rot from the inside out. my skull is as squishy as a newborn’s head. 

I have a rustling shoe box under my bed. from time to time, it slides out as if to say, hey. hey, remember that time you were tender? yes. remember when you were loved so hard they wanted to leave a mark of it? yes. I want the box to push its lid off like a boiling pot. I want to feel it ticking under my sleep. I want it to elect its next president, someone kind, like what a whisper looks like on a page. move over turkey feathers. there’s always room for one more.

[sticker by a Philadelphia sticker graffiti artist] 

post-it notes
by Jane-Rebecca Cannarella
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There are days when I’ve loved you like a mirror and I’m hypnotized; you’re my reflection’s self. The other night, laying on the couch opposite-ended like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you took a photo of me with your phone when I wasn’t looking and texted it to me. We were playing time machine, which is when minutes don’t tick by while under a blanket that resembles a Hershey bar. Sometimes boredom and comfort look very similar.

I looked old, and dry, and tired. I didn’t love you like the mirror of me having learned to thank my parts as I stared at the phone. Suffocating and sweating under the burden of the blankets, we became strangers.

I’ve been known to love you like we’re halved. Asymmetrical. Pieced together to make a whole. We’ve replaced letters with texts and the one on my phone with my face yellow in the lamp’s shade filled me with an unrecognizable feeling. The closest emotion to give it is loss. How can looking at me make me feel the loss of you? We aren’t under the blanket anymore. In the days following, sometimes I would look at the texted photo of the strange woman.

​I have piles of post-it notes I’ve written to myself periodically throughout the years scattered all over my home in various rainbows of aging beige. Memories of my moments, and when I read them I can see how I actually look. Or at least how I think I look. In the mountains of fluttered sticky notes, sometimes I see a shadow of our asymmetrical features never quite touching. I need to take the time to read them in order to see this. I don’t do that often.
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Are my love letters filled with truth or lies?
Do they cause highs or cries?
I would surmise, that you agonize over words that jeopardize yet hypnotize.

While you demonize, I attempt to moralize
While I revise, you militarize.
Is it you, or is it me that dramatize and oversize the problems that are pint-size?

I write letters that reprise and justify
But they only terrorize and galvanize
I write to apologize, you say I only finalize and eulogize, not humanize

I try to revitalize and romanticize
But you don’t empathize or recognize,
So, our relationship is an illegitimate enterprise, so I internalize and compartmentalize.

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