Beloveds, in graphite and ink—

I cannot bear the margins empty,
so I send you drawings more than words.
On the back of your article,
I sketch the girl translator
as a tightrope walker
crossing a line of text,
each legal term a gust of wind.

On the edge of your field report,
I draw the cholera clinic
as a shaky boat,
its IV stands as masts,
its flags stitched from discarded gloves.

The mail clerk smiles now
when he sees me coming,
envelopes fat with paper birds and small collages
made of ticket stubs and ration labels.

You write of shellfire,
I answer with a pencil sun
cracked by careful erasures.

You write of “jurisdiction,”
I answer with a river
flowing through a courtroom,
carrying away the chairs.

Once, I painted a generator
as a stubborn heart
bolted to the ground,
veins of cable running outwards
to tents and lamps.
On the side I wrote,
in small letters,
“evidence of life.”

The gallery said the work was “political.”
I wanted to tell them
it was simply accurate.

From my small studio,
I imagine all your papers
meeting in some distant sorting room:
forms under poems,
legal briefs beside charcoal sketches,
postmarks overlapping like timelines.

If anyone opened them all at once,
what map would appear?
Not the kind with borders,
but the kind made of gestures:
your hand on a stretcher,
your hand on a keyboard,
my hand smudged with ink,
our journalist’s hand steady over a notebook
while the press room hums.

Until that unseen clerk reads everything,
I will keep sending fragments—
a line of verse,
a handdrawn margin,
a sticker peeled from a piece of fruit
placed over a spot of bruised world.

Meet me, all of you,
in the dead letter office of our century,
where nothing is truly lost,
only waiting to be sorted
into the right pair of hands.

David Brickey Bloomer (he/him) is a humanitarian advisor, writer, and photographer based in Singapore, with more than two decades of fieldwork across South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific. A self-described tragic optimist, he works in poetry, documentary photography, and hybrid forms organized around the practice of paying attention. His photography can be found at davidbrickeybloomer.com and poetry and writing at davidbrickeybloomer.substack.com