Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper – Martin Espada

At sixteen, I worked after high school hours

at a printing plant

that manufactured legal pads:

Yellow paper

5 stacked seven feet high

and leaning

as I slipped cardboard

between the pages,

then brushed red glue

10 up and down the stack.

No gloves: fingertips required

for the perfection of paper,

smoothing the exact rectangle.

Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands

15 would slide along suddenly sharp paper,

and gather slits thinner than the crevices

of the skin, hidden.

Then the glue would sting,

hands oozing

20 till both palms burned

at the punchclock.

Ten years later, in law school,

I knew that every legal pad

was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,

25 that every open lawbook

was a pair of hands

upturned and burning.