Correspondence

I open my mailbox
hoping to find a letter
from someone I don’t know
They used to call them pen pals
It gives me a chance to use my ink pen
Jan from South Dakota sends me photos
of hawks, Sue from Montana tells me about
her eleven children, and Joy from a small village
in Western Australia speaks of quiet and barrenness
Once I owned a postal box in another town
where my letters waited until I gathered
them, read them over coffee in a local
bakery and wrote a return letter
Often crumbs from a cruller
dropped into the crease
of  folded  papers