Lines by Tessa Sagner

Someone is drawing you somewhere

Eyes slotted between blue lines of ruled paper, close enough to you and your shape with hints of every other boy in the world

If you will see it, if you’re okay with it, I can be okay with everything around and about you

Even and especially the distance decay and perpetual shearing down into a caveman-boy with an angled face

In mother’s photographs from behind where the back of your head is very small, long abandoned the scruff of your neck, so bare without a lion’s mane slung across it

If you just quietly listen to those classroom portraits, snuck and stolen, by the people you will never see again, you’ll find

your red boxes around apparitions and stickered down to stamps in loving envelope-lick kisses

or thumbtacked between the eyes

They’ll never get your hair as long as I got it but the pictures added a few inches anyways-- truth stranger than fiction!