red booth
review

Everyone knows the picture of perfection is lined with a thick layer 
of blank ivory snow, and no sound.  Yet the textbooks say the white color 
of snow is nothing but a series of reflections.  So this is my autopsy
of transparency, made flat under the knife.  For a time I was under

the impression that to write a poem, one’s heart was required
to be wrung and hemorrhaging, clamped in a vice, blood running like 
tears, or, in the least, other bodily fluids.  All the gore of an adolescent’s 
prized wound.  But instead, I find the pacific relief of small truths

rising from winter’s quiet solitude like tiny bumps of Braille.  
I think of your arrival and how tidy it was, the single weathered suitcase
whose contents you dispatched in the quartered length
of a single hour.  There is something pristine about this memory as 

I seep in this vacuum of absent space and sound, it is 
as if I am a forgotten teabag, surrounded by ribbons of burgundy ink.
Like all things liquid, they’ll swirl and dissipate, I know, but only if 
I move.  
 
 

- Suzanne Rindell