A Fish So Large
Astronomers
Buckets
Cycling
Graphology
How to Stay Awake
In Praise of Bao
January's End
Museum of Septum
My Promenade
Nourish
Paint and Ink
Shape Shift
The Condor
The Dress
Walking Around: The Sixth Wave of Extinctions
What I Watched On My Summer Vacation
Winner Take Nothing
Words at War
You Thrive Now
Graphology
Jeanne Wagner
I was the curse in cursive, came of age clutching a chewed yellow
pencil,
watched it smear my mind’s most ardent lines. I saw the small
spiky freight
of my letters slide off the pale blue rails, waited for the inevitable
betrayals
from cottony paper thirsty for ink, was chided for my careless
blots, inevitable
erasures, those accordioned rips, like flapped up window shades,
that lay bare
the shameful space hidden behind my words. Some days I
pretended
I was a scribe, one of the saintly ones who sat at a wooden desk,
light from
a mullioned window washing over the pure vellum on which I
formed my
perfect majuscules. Other times I envied the innocent script the
nice girls had,
circles like halos overhanging their i’s, because they wanted to
open themselves up,
their letters evenly spaced and holding hands like the families
five-year-olds draw,
fingers looped like ells or lobed like the petals of their prelapsarian
flowers.
Our teachers warned us that character is revealed in handwriting,
our signature true
to its word, the sign of our nature. Already I knew my life was a
forgery,
waiting to be detected by experts. Sooner or later I’d be caught
and the name
I never chose and so artlessly formed would turn up as Exhibit A,
evidence against me.
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pencil,
watched it smear my mind’s most ardent lines. I saw the small
spiky freight
of my letters slide off the pale blue rails, waited for the inevitable
betrayals
from cottony paper thirsty for ink, was chided for my careless
blots, inevitable
erasures, those accordioned rips, like flapped up window shades,
that lay bare
the shameful space hidden behind my words. Some days I
pretended
I was a scribe, one of the saintly ones who sat at a wooden desk,
light from
a mullioned window washing over the pure vellum on which I
formed my
perfect majuscules. Other times I envied the innocent script the
nice girls had,
circles like halos overhanging their i’s, because they wanted to
open themselves up,
their letters evenly spaced and holding hands like the families
five-year-olds draw,
fingers looped like ells or lobed like the petals of their prelapsarian
flowers.
Our teachers warned us that character is revealed in handwriting,
our signature true
to its word, the sign of our nature. Already I knew my life was a
forgery,
waiting to be detected by experts. Sooner or later I’d be caught
and the name
I never chose and so artlessly formed would turn up as Exhibit A,
evidence against me.