Melody Wilson is a pushcart nominated poet whose poems appear in Pangyrus, VerseDaily, The Fiddlehead, Crab Creek Review, San Pedro River Review, Watershed and elsewhere. She is pursuing her MFA at Pacific University. Her chapbook, Spineless: Memoir in Invertebrates came out in 2023. Find more of her work at melodywilson.com.
Slim Wire
--for Nia
Americans use eleven billion paperclips a year,
each of them folded from spools of wire.
They rain from machines the size of freezers
into cardboard boxes. We extract one
to bind a contract or clip a photo
to a form. Children chain them together
for necklaces. There are thirty-five clips
for each citizen, and today in class
one shimmers on the floor. You stoop to pick it up.
Are you allowed to keep that? I ask, imagine
guards flipping your cell. Two years in, three to go,
in the past six months you’ve earned 12 credits—
each one dulls the edge of your past. No one
will care, you say, and slip the paperclip
into your transparent bag. And why not?
It will separate chapter summaries
from the narrative of your rape, the draft
of your essay about Princess Diana.
Next week, a machine will slip at your
dollar an hour job, and after class
you will unwind the gauze to expose
your ruined finger, inscribing the line
between the parts of yourself you get to keep
and the parts you will leave behind.
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