Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry
No Signature
The quiet man lived above the drone path,
five flights up, where no one looked.
Each morning, with tea and unlined pages
He waited longer than most people
waited for thought now.
He never asked the page to be brilliant
The quiet man asked it to be his, not automatic
That was all.
He wrote by hand in “Notebook 17”
in a world that no longer believed in cursive.
Graphite, not code, and sentences with corners
Margins with breathing room.
The quiet man wrote slowly enough
that the words knew they were chosen
Metaphors that connected feeling and memory
Trying to capture what the last writers did.
No name, date. No file trace.
Just a line about the heat not coming on
pressed deep into the paper
as if he knew someone might need to feel it later.
She found the notebook
misfiled with an incorrect label.
It shouldn’t have reached her desk
but it did
In the quiet of the library archive
she read a line that made her
forget what time it was.
The glass case was a simple construction.
A single page with no metadata
Pulled from Notebook 17.
People came from all over the world
One girl sat for forty minutes
without taking a photo
A woman returned with her daughter
to trace the loops of the letter “g”.
A tall man wrote his own name
for the first time in fourteen years
With a shaky hand that was out of practice
But he finished his thoughts.
They built a big alcove with only paper and pencils
Like the tall man with the shaky hand, people wrote again
In the alcove
A place to remember
that thought has texture when it travels the long way.
The quiet man was never named
But no one forgets him now
He is the reason the archive has a quiet room
and a drawer marked
To Be Kept
Laura Cococcia is a New York City-based writer and communications strategist focusing on societal change and cultural themes. She is active in the Aspen Institute and TED and has held leadership roles at Google, American Express, and GE. Her work has appeared in various online publications. Laura holds a master’s degree from Cornell University and a bachelor’s degree in English from the College of the Holy Cross.