How Are You, I Am Fine

                    –Alice Fulton

Given the shrapnel melancholia
Makes of the dictionary it's no
Fait accompli, this emergence
With insight into our actual assets.

The tasted parallel takes place
At a club in a future where jazz
Has resumed its urgency,
Letters home plucked from a dumpster

To be delivered belatedly.
Some begin the way our mothers said
Would make us unloveable, how are you,
I am fine, and do they tear up

The ones who find us long after
The starlight stopped beaconing,
As in dampen the corners of their eyes
To the point of making sleeves darker?

Yes. Night might tear the paper
Too, obliterate the envelope, set
The ribbon coiling, a firework snake.
The thank you for writing we await.