© Jessica Frey MSIV
I never knew that seeing someone’s soul would be so
Beautiful and broken
Would be so wide and silver would be so-
I took your tears and your fragile words in the palm of my hand
And I tried to realign them tried to hold them over
the flame of a Bunsen burner and melt them all
back down together again
into the orange and red and blue and green
paper crane with wings that you are.
Just be a color that I can understand.
Because you let me unfold you
You let me see the creases and the cracks and we can’t go back
No matter how many times I try to refold your soul
It’s like an accordion
It all pops out of its neat little box
A slinky sprawled down
And down
And down.
It’s hard to see you as just this thin piece of paper
All stretched out flat with its many many pleats and crinkles and folds.
I want to smooth them out I want to
press them down I want to iron all those crumples I want to-
Its okay. Somewhere along the way
I forgot
that the creases and the lines are supposed to be there.
That’s the only way for you to remember how to fly.
Judge’s Comments:
The physicality of this piece illustrates precisely what occurs in the intersecting folds of one person’s life with another person’s life. The first stanza itself appears almost interrupted by another reflection in stanza two that folds its way into the writer’s consciousness. Also notable are the simple, concrete nouns—mostly monosyllabic—soul, tears, hand, flame, crane, box, pleats, and folds. The writer acknowledges competing desires to “smooth [the wrinkles] out” and “iron all those crumples”. In the end, even these turn gently over to the realization that the needs of another necessitate respect for the furrows and folds that made flight possible at all.