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.