Two poems were born on paper in the upstairs back bedroom of an aging split level, one named Idea of God one named Denise.
They were loved. They were tacked up and showed off. They spent their youth full of fire and energy, making their way off the corkboard and onto the streets of GeoCities, wasting all night with kids who locked their LiveJournal accounts. People stopped scrolling and took notice. Idea of God and Denise could bring a fifteen-year-old to tears, provided they were in the right mood and probably a little drunk.
They were never allowed to forget where they came from, still tacked on the wall night after night. Because of this, they were two of the few pieces able to survive the great digital purge of ’05. By that time Idea of God had started fading at the edges and Denise was ripped halfway down the middle. Idea of God and Denise moved into a multi-unit dwelling with dozens of student loan notices, back issues of Nylon and a concerning amount of expired credit card forms in a folder labeled “to shred.”
They spent their golden years in the same upstairs back bedroom where they were born, living under a bed that was used only a few times a year. If Idea of God and Denise were thought of at all, it was with contempt. Even so, they made peace with their circumstances. They had been sleeping for a very long time when they heard a voice yell—
“I really need you to clean out that box of crap that’s under your bed.”
Two poems were found on paper in the upstairs future home gym of an aging split level and held up to the light, thin strips of skin shed years ago. Too fragile to survive very long outside of their bunker, too earnest for the modern world, thrust back into a room they no longer recognized.
They were loved. They were filed away in a folder labeled “to keep.” They didn’t know where they were going. They didn’t know where the folder was to be kept.
But it was like Idea of God always said, immortality is a perfection which shapes the…something about a soul…stars lost to…circumstance…maybe. To be honest, the handwriting is kind of hard to read.
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Jill Spradley is a writer and creative director living in Philadelphia. She, like many others, is on twitter: twitter.com/sprads
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image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 