Dear Antoine,
At the table in the convention center I looked at you and thought, That is what a face should look like. That is the face I would design if I was God. Like a dark-red rosebush I once saw against a white wall, like a pale-green balloon floating toward the bone-white moon in a rusty autumn dream — your face flashed into my life and made me feel I’d be fine, eventually.
Yours,
Gina
Dear Gina,
Yours is the best e-mail I’ve received all year. I guess you heard I was a poet. I had the feeling you might also be some kind of poet. Something about that coat you wore at the endless conference and the way your eyes moved. And you were scribbling those lines in that little book of yours with the deer on it. I could tell you weren’t just “taking notes.”
