West Trade Review Spring Preview: "Slim Wire" by Melody Wilson

Melody Wilson

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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