Face we cut from our photo album.
Incident we omit
from our history books.

No one can remember
what R did to become
our scarlet letter,

why there is a blue collar
blue law against it.
But here we are

with our collective
speech impediment,
our East Coast Cockney.

We chew our words
with our mouth open.
We draw their drawer

and leave it ajar.
Our doctors ask us
to open up and say car

or czar or jaguar.
In studies, children
deem us the babysitters

most likely to litter,
burn dinner,
leave the door unlatched,

leave them at the park
without a parka
after dark.

But without R
we never scar or scare.
We never ask for more.

We are closer
to our mothers than we are
to our farthers.

No, we have never
seen dropped R’s
shimmer in the air.

But they have an after-
life of sorts.
They gather in the ether.

They come back to us
in the drumfire
of late summer thunder.

Will Dowd ’06 is a Boston area writer. He earned an MFA from New York University in 2011.

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