Molly Peacock
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Portrait of a Letter as a Young B
B came late to breakfast at the font colony
on a breezy summer morning.
B was a serif font but landed in the last spot
at a table of elderly Lucida Grandes.
“Hey, a Bembo in our midst,” an old Grande said.
B smiled shyly.
“Welcome to the font colony.”
The long large-flowered curtains ballooned.
Their breakfast chatter was all about font shows,
font publications, font editions, and font awards,
and where a sans serif had the best chance.
B ate scrambled eggs, burnt bacon, and blackberries
from a little bowl, recalling her grandmother’s table.
The other, younger letters had formed their own tables,
staking them out early.
But B was new. And late.
Some of the fonts at the older Reject Table,
as B came to think of it, resented the name
of every new font from Comic to Zapf,
but others had a soft, dedicated glow,
and, to entertain young Bembo, those oldster fonts
talked about their work on B’s.
They still like forming “better, “best,”
and the babbling double and triple B words
like “bubble” and “bobble.”
One of them, Brass Betty, unabashedly hummed
“Baubles, bangles, and bright shiny beads.”
Old Bilious loved his bite, like an acid sauna.
He was strictly a one-b maker: blight, bright, and bight.
By now the breakfast groups were so completely formed
that B never got to sit with her peers.
Even if she arrived early, she knew that by barging
into someone else’s chair, she was creating
a displacement,
forcing the other font
to sit with the blistering Times New Roman.
Times was bitterest of all,
and sat alone at his own table.
B had barely heard of the positions and honors
that Times so mordantly resented.
On those mornings B went to the letterpress with relief
and spent the day there becoming word after word,
showing each word its possibilities in a font like her,
Bembo.
She had yet to choose her favorite b’s.
Bitching, breaking, bruising?
No, she tended toward brillig.
She loved the stories of the beggars in the roads
who voluntarily gave up everything,
but she had not yet learned to go only toward the positive.
What she learned that summer was to flee the negative
and developed a Bembo prayer:
Don’t let me B like U.
Don’t let me B bitter.
Don’t let me break against the wrong words
until I am bent and bruised.
B was so young, she had yet to get to love.
Right then she was just learning to work,
and the old benign rejected ones impressed her.
Not much they had done was rewarded,
but they were working along at being,
engaging themselves from bramble to Beelzebub
anonymously.
Not to be bitter, Bembo prayed
and just . . . just. . . .
to stay,
to do what I do.
So she bumbled through the rest of her summer.
“Portrait of a Letter as a Young B” was originally published in the Tenth Anniversary Issue of Barrow Street, Winter, 2008.
Bio
Molly Peacock is the author of six volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems. Her poems have appeared in leading literary journals as well as in numerous anthologies, including The Best of the Best American Poetry and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She is the Series Editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English and serves on the Graduate Faculty of the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her latest work of nonfiction is The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72.