You see me as a kind of black and white magic sketch. A circle,
say, a couple horns, a line or two and voilà—yang, the word for
goat. Great for you, your tomes and texts, poems and billets-doux.
But what about me, forever stuck here on this cage of a page? Oh,
how I long to be the thing you say I mean, to butt my way out of this
snowy wilderness with the very horns your brush drew to make me.
I’d lick off the glue that binds the spine of this prison, nibble an exit
with lips soft as flannel, chew to shreds the ideogram for leaves or
worm, gnaw through the ink for dandelions, for doughnut, for angel.
Poem by Joe Smith
Illustration by Honoria Starbuck
