EB's Response to "My Skeleton" by Jane Hirshfield (Poet-to-Poet)

Ode to the Hole-Punch

Elyse Brownell

My hole-punch,

sitting on the mahogany surface

awkward in stature.

Your origins date back to Germany,

1886, designed to “punch holes in paper”

your founder, Frederich Soennecken,

treated you with such care, precision,

after the invention of a paper, Nietzsche

himself wrote to other poets,

declaring the paper’s top quality

to write on

and now, a hole-punch,

created to punch holes

in such paper, to allow

the acco of breath, to suspend

data in portfolios—

organization is your primary purpose,

utility, but a design patent is where

you began.

Centuries later, mass-produced

and landing on my desk,

an office tool I rely heavily on:

black ceramic skin, a lever used

to push a bladed cylinder straight

through sheets of paper

through Soennecken’s original thought

creating space for more ideas,

more metal prongs, protruding through bodies,

combining the elements.

Palm flat on your lever,

paper placed between the long silver guides

running through your core

and I press down,

a slow creak from your springs

and you recoil

producing two, perfect circles

placed apart evenly, accurately,

ready for placement

and I wonder:

how many hands have touched you?

paraded you?

relied on you?

complained about you?

forced weight upon you?

only to leave remains of paper

in your belly—

a silver sliding door beneath you.

Do you miss each one of them

a mother to their child—

After all, it is you

who created such perfect

round, holes.

In response to "My Skeleton" by Jane Hirshfield