The Box
RACHAEL LIN WHEELER
in the photo, it is my fifteenth
birthday & i am opening
the navy, palm-sized box
i imagine the silver bracelet inside
once looped around my mother’s
wrist when she was my age & her hands
were too small to hold
onto river water unspooled, its surge
heard but never felt
*
a history unopened is imagined
as weightless, yet it pierced
through the center of my body
before anyone realized
it was there
think gilded blade severing ribbon, or mouth
filled with water & smoke: another song
lost & buried in silt
*
like any empty room, i am tired of mourning
the faces in photos i cannot name
*
when i was still nameless,
i was found
in a box left on summer-hot steps
somewhere in a country
whose language lifted ghost-like
from my tongue
before i ever learned
its taste
beside me: powdered milk
to stave off
some predicted hunger
*
i wonder if the woman, who i imagine
has the same hands
i do, or the same voice—all rolling
marble & thick bell ring—i wonder
if she remembers my birthday
The two of us sit on the dark lawn
beside the terracotta terrace, soft
lit amber straying from the one
open window of the farmhouse.
We speak outside of ourselves,
this stranger & I. Those inside,
whose voices I could not assign
to faces, lie alone in the lamplight
of their unlocked bedrooms: drift
from thought to thought & from breath
to breath as if each were only some
passing fallow doe, none of which
they will recall—& none of these
fleeting selves will leave the privacy
of their own bodies—once morning
waxes above the cypress & above
our little lives. The woman
beside me offers stories of her
sister, her childhood city, but
never what brought her here.
I imagine each story falling
into the nets of grapevine fields
below, or sent to the sleeping
cinta senese down the path as if
they were lullabies. To believe
those animals also need someone
to listen to. To know each story
is evidence of our own survival.
Tuscan Nocturne
Rachael Lin Wheeler is currently a student attending Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and her writing and photography have been recognized by Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Her poetry appears in various publications. Serving as the editorial assistant for EX/POST MAGAZINE, Rachael Lin is also the founder and editor of Vox Viola Literary Magazine—an intersectional feminist publication—which can be found at https://voxviola.com. She is prone to 2 am laundry folding.
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