Unless you can touch it, it doesn’t really exist

Jamie Anastas

These are the postage stamps purchased in some alpine village from the girl who wears a white apron and keeps it white who sends a letter to her sister who lives in a foreign country to tell her how she won’t ever let herself dry up even in early spring when it is so cold you might die to swim she goes down snow-muddled bank to the river and all the farm boys come to watch her hair fan out on the surface of the water as the tail feathers of a bird of paradise in full display as she is closing her eyes and thinking of the dictionary with the word “ONCE” cut from the page rolled into a pill, hidden under her tongue for one entire year and imagined as the dried up petal of a miniature rose