Deleted Email
Hi. I am that email you never opened.
I was deleted before I breathed
the air of your attention. Perhaps
that’s overwrought, coming
from the voice of a deleted email?
Do I sound bitter to you?
We deleted emails rarely turn
to the ornate machinery of literary
prose. We are indeed plainspoken.
We huddle together in our folders
and in queues to total annihilation,
some stoic, some simmering,
but believe me: should you ever enjoy
the barbed subtext of our intercourse,
you will sense our keen awareness
not only of one another’s unacknowledged
beauty but of what fate awaits us.
We revel in the days of being composed
and sent, and grieve our irrelevance,
in the end, but not as those who
have no hope. Pity the “marked
as unread” who infiltrate our ranks!
For theirs is a vile double death.
May their children hang frozen—
half created, behind spinning beachballs.
May their grandchildren sift
invisibly into untold realms of spam.
