Susanna Lang Dead Letters .
‌cries like dead letters sent to dearest him that lives alas! away. Gerard Manley Hopkins
Marked Recipient Unknown— the numbers reversed, or if the numbers were correct the street was wrong, someone wrote West instead of North. Sent to an address misheard, misunderstood, impossible to imagine from the other side of the globe— Sterite or Stiejt instead of Street. Addressed but not delivered, not deliverable, sent to the dead letter office to be destroyed after any items of value had been removed from the envelope, the paper (smudged, edges crinkled, saturated with ink and with the words someone had rehearsed for days before committing to them) sold for scrap. Addressed in a dead language, a language no one speaks anymore, though a few remember hearing it spoken when they were young: Appalachee, Galice dialect, Miami-Illinois, Nooksack, or the Aka-Bo known only by an old woman in India who died this year, who survived the tsunami in 2004 because she understood when the earth spoke to her and so knew to climb a tree high above the floods. 60