Epistolary Echo 

Associate Editor Kate Jayroe: Choi’s reverberating verse memorializes the lost mail of the Titanic. While we’ve no doubt encountered haunting images, recollections, and creative interpretations of the doomed ocean liner’s maiden-and-final voyage, Choi’s heedful details and sparkling images offer a movingly unique distillation of what was written, lost.

Listen to Stephanie Choi read the poem:

Epistolary Echo

RMS Titanic was a steamship commissioned by the Royal Mail Service to transport mail between Europe and America. An estimated 6–9 million pieces of mail and 700–800 parcel post shipments were lost. This poem is dedicated to the postal service workers who all lost their lives: William Gwinn, John March, John Smith, James Williamson, and Oscar Woody.  

               Partial to parcels,  
postcards, and letters  
               over all that pomp  
                           and opulence—the virgin  
china, jeweled manuscripts, silk  
               opera hats—we pledged  
                             safe passage to paper, 
ink, and stamp. So when we heard 
              the hollow screech of hull 
                             and saw the water  
             flood in, we ran those mail sacks 
to the upper decks— 
                              all those tiny vessels 
announcing glorious gossip, 
               mundanities: 
                               arguments, affairs; the simple 
delight of spotting a bluebird  
               in the bush, of spreading  
                             butter across bread—in our hands  
we held those voices  
                            as they sang  
              us into  
                           the sea