Dear Susie,
Blue night creeps over me here, a closing door. Today, from the sky, I watched a hawk scrape gray dawn. Tried to imagine catching something so quick in my palm – in my dreams I pull it from the air and know what it feels like to change something with my hands. So far, all the damage I do is from the heavens. I’ve nothing to haunt me but imagined faces. I didn’t want to be a cruel God.
Your pale hands lie gentle, two white birds on the table in the church in my mind. Memory crumbles quietly into Newburgh rain and the tobacco blossom fog of your mother’s house.
Strange honeymoon. I’ve stolen your face cast in moonlight away with me, carry you every night long as this war. Close my eyes and I’m just blinking under the officer’s club awning and if I opened them, I’d find you beaming a pearl-glow halo into the dusk. I’m always wandering around that night in West Point, where the streetlamp ponds of warm light are always kissing and I’m never in the dark.
Susie, the sky sprawls a thin purple line above me, I am just twenty-one – it hits me, a quick white sound.
Home, I could have touched the brick just to feel grit real as anything beneath my fingertips. I didn’t. Here is nothing but the shrill cries of birds and the sob of the atmosphere parting around the plane which devours me, a cold steel death.
Susie, everyone here calls me boy. I forget my own name, become nothing but boy, nothing but body. Get lost in all this blue. We’re supposed to be men and women by now but my body lives around me – I walk around inside it. I didn’t think it would be like this. Always I commit the crime of living inside the shudder of the engine, the cold silence of the lonely night.
Send me another letter along the wire we climb towards each other – In my dreams, you fall away into bitter violet ocean, your voice fades into a distant hum I can only hear over the radio.
Speak to me, Susie. Tell me this was not a mistake. Tell me when I return to you and the New York snows, flying over vast blue night, we will still be young, and I will not have killed that too.
All my love,
Richard
Lawson N. Lewis is a Florida poet and prosaist. She is an intern for the Jacksonville chapter of Women Writing For a Change, a former staff member of Élan International Student Literary Magazine, and a recipient of the Dr. James Robert Cobb Student Writing Award in first prize for page poetry. Her work revolves around themes of familial and personal relationships, shifting identity, and the dissection of ideals like freedom, inheritance, and femininity.
