Robbi Nester
Surprisingly, before this poem, I really had never written in the epistolary form before. Perhaps it's because since the advent of email, I hadn't written a proper letter in quite a while, aside from business communications and job applications. Since email and tweets and facebook notes and texts are so brief, they generally do not encourage the telling of stories or the spilling of secrets. Biographies will probably be the poorer for the demise of this form of communication when what is left over from a life is only its digital traces, videos of kittens, shared political sentiments, and not the intimate speaking of one voice directly to another, as in the epistolary form.
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Note to Self
You may not know me,
but I once was you.
Together at the window,
we’d grow dizzy, watching
the swirling snowflakes
settle into five foot drifts.
At school, I whispered
answers in your ear, and all
the questions teachers
didn’t want to hear.
I read over your shoulder
the books we both loved best,
told you how to catch
the tiger swallowtail
that beat its patterned
wings against the pane.
You once fell off your bicycle
into broken glass; but it is I
who bear the scar.
Like you, I have a kind of
power born of shame.
At eleven, you began to bleed.
But when you asked her why,
mother embraced, then slapped you,
passing down the ancient curse.
I haven’t seen you since,
although for years I’d haunt
the empty pool, the park,
the library, all the places
where you used to go.
Now I am you, but
with a difference.
There are questions
only you can answer.
Please come back.
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Robbi Nester is the author of a chapbook, Balance, released in 2012 by White Violet Press. She has also published individual poems in Inlandia, Northern Liberties Review, Qarrtsiluni, Victorian Violet Press, Floyd County Moonshine, and Caesura. A poem is also forthcoming in Jenny. Her essays have appeared in two anthologies, Easy to Love but Hard to Raise (DRT Press, 2011) and Flashlight Memories (Silver Boomer Press, 2011), and has published reviews in The Hollins Critic and Switchback.