TRANSACTION

Paula Bonnell

He handed me a small object

the shape of a brick, but smaller.

It could have been a box, I don’t know.

It was heavy.

I asked him, “Is the sadness in it?”

“Is it closed?”

“Will it leak?”

He looked back at me,

steadily, attentively.

But he said nothing.

Paula Bonnell

Paula Bonnell’s poems have been published nationally and internationally. She is a PEN New England Discovery writer, the author of Airs & Voices and three other collections of poems, as well as essays and book reviews in The Christian Science Monitor and other major newspapers.


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