I'm delighted to feature today a poem by Ricky Monahan Brown, taken from his recent pamphlet, Drawer of Letters (Broken Sleep Books, 2025).
The piece I've chosen is titled ‘Drawer’, so its significance within the manuscript as a whole is pretty clear. I don't tend to be a fan of poems that use the passive voice a lot, nor of poems that don't contain any main verbs. However, those two devices are actually used to terrific effect here, holding back narrative details that the reader is allowed to fill in, such as the identity of the protagonists. Meanwhile, progressively tweaked repetition is clearly a driving force, used deftly, moving us forward without any punctuation towards the poem's emotional core.
I hope you enjoy it, and please consider visiting the Broken Sleep website (see here) to grab a copy of the pamphlet if you do...
Drawer
a
drawer made of letters
letters
made of lined paper
letters
made of hand-cut paper
letters
made of thick Egyptian sheets
letters
made of translucent skin
letters
bound by bulldog clips
letters
secured by steely staples
letters
gathered by woven strings
letters
stuck by elastic gum bands
letters
woken by a slashing pen
letters
leavened by a smiling blot
letters
smudged by a dragging hand
letters
blurred by <illegible>
letters
built by paragraph slabs
paragraphs
formed from frilly sentences
sentences
verbed into brief existence
verbs
that describe a life
and
a letter made of words
made
of letters
like
L
and
E
and
A
and
V
