Unwritten

UNWRITTEN

Enough to reveal part of what covers a skull, to scrape out its ink with a trowel: a loop of an unfinished alphabet, a C bent to an incomplete circle. Language is not vacant only quiet and nameless, unwritten in the depths of the page, an unclothed sound. Excavate an O to remove its tiny white cranium; within text there is extinction, the bone-shaped artifact. See the skeleton of a head, how it grinned, how the teeth of its sentence clenched until it chipped a piece of a letter? You will dig the rest of its design from the layered page, chip at its body until the bone is exposed; fold the paper in half, in that moment you will feel it separate from its form. Chart the dark structure of its bones, the framework of a letter is only a body bag; within the page, that is where the calcium hardens.

Orlando White

[Originally published in Oregon Literary Review, Summer/Fall 07]