I
The stove in my attic is older than the Republic.
It eats birch, coal, newspapers, the bad drafts of poems,
and tonight, love, it eats you.
Eleven letters. I counted them twice,
the way you used to count my ribs with one finger
from the bottom up, slowly, saying
there’s one missing, there must be, nobody’s this hungry.
II
The first letter is from the summer
you rented the room above the bakery in Malá Strana
and the whole floor was warm from the ovens beneath,
and we lay on it at four in the morning
like two loaves rising,
my hair stuck to your chest,
the smell of yeast and your sweat and the river.
You wrote: I can still feel the floor in my back.
I can still feel you on my front.
I hold it to the iron door.
The corner catches blue, then gold.
Your handwriting curls up like a hand opening
and then closing for good.
III
The second is short. Wednesday. Charles Bridge. Midnight. Wear nothing under the coat.
I did. It was February.
The statues watched us with their stone saints’ eyes
and the wind came up the Vltava like a knife
and you put your warm hands inside my coat
and the whole cold city went away.
That one burns fast. Of course it does.
Short things always do.
IV
I should tell you I’m drinking.
Becherovka, from the bottle you left,
the one shaped like a little green coffin.
It tastes of cloves and Christmas and your mouth.
That’s the problem with you. Everything tastes of your mouth.
V
The fourth letter is the one with the lipstick.
Not mine. You said it was your sister’s,
you said she borrowed your coat, you said
so many things in that warm brown voice
that I believed for a whole spring.
I kept it anyway. I kept it to hate.
I hold it longest.
I watch the red print go black,
a mouth closing on its own lie,
and I feel — God help me — nothing like relief.
I feel jealous of the fire.
It gets to have you all at once.
VI
Five. Six. Seven. I don’t read them now.
I know them the way you know a street in the dark.
Seven is the one where you say
my body is a city you’d like to get lost in.
You stole that from a song. I let you.
I let you steal everything.
The stove roars. The window frosts over from the inside.
The spires of Týn outside go blurred and black
like two old witches leaning together to whisper.
VII
Here is what I didn’t tell you,
any of the nights you slept in this attic
with your arm thrown over your eyes:
I used to watch you.
Not for a minute. For hours.
The tiny muscle at your jaw that ticked when you dreamed.
The way your hand opened and closed on the sheet
as if reaching for a rope.
I watched you the way I watch old glass —
waiting to see where the light would break through you.
It never did. You were all lead and no window.
I loved you anyway. I loved you because.
VIII
Letter nine is the goodbye.
Three lines. You didn’t even use a full page.
I’d tear the bottom off and keep the blank part
except I am trying, love, I am trying so hard
to be a woman who doesn’t keep the blank part.
IX
The tenth isn’t from you.
It’s mine. The one I never sent.
Four pages. I won’t tell you what’s in it.
Only that it begins with your name
and ends with the word stay
and in between is everything a body can say
without the body.
It’s the slowest one to burn.
The paper’s thick. The ink is thick.
I had pressed so hard.
X
I’m warm now. Hot, even.
I’ve taken off the sweater, the scarf, the second sock.
I’m sitting on the floor in front of the open stove
in just your old shirt, the one with the frayed cuff,
my knees pulled up, my skin gone red-gold in the light,
and the heat on my bare legs feels
almost exactly like your breath used to,
when you’d start at the ankle
and take your time.
XI
That’s the thing nobody tells you about burning letters.
You don’t get rid of anything.
You just read them one last time
with your whole body.
The eleventh letter is still in my hand.
It’s the first one you ever wrote me.
Two words. A café napkin. Your phone number.
Call me.
The stove is waiting. Its iron mouth is open.
Snow is falling past the window onto Žižkov,
soft, endless, forgiving everything.
I should burn it.
I am going to burn it.
I am looking at the numbers.
I still know them by heart.
