Someone Keeps Posting Poems in Our Elevator
Floor by floor, an anonymous neighbor is educating the whole building.
The first poem appeared on a Tuesday, taped over the button panel inspection certificate, four lines about rain on a tin awning, typed on paper the color of weak tea. By Thursday the society WhatsApp group had one hundred and twelve messages about it, and not one of them was about the poem.
Who authorized this. Is this a society-approved notice. Remove immediately, fire hazard. My personal favorite, from the retired bank auditor on six: If we allow poems today, tomorrow it will be birthday invitations, and then where does it end.
Where it ended, as it turned out, was everywhere.
Our building is nineteen floors of people who have perfected the elevator stare, that fixed gaze at the floor numbers that says I acknowledge your existence and request that it come no closer.
I have lived here six years and could not have told you the name of a single person above the eighth floor.
The elevator takes fifty-one seconds from lobby to nineteen. I know because the poet knew. Every poem that ever appeared could be read, comfortably, in under fifty seconds.
That detail alone told me this was a person who had thought about us.
The secretary took the first poem down. A new one appeared the next morning, this time about the pigeons on the fourteenth-floor ledge, and how they hold committee meetings with better attendance than ours. Someone in the group actually typed lol. The auditor threatened to review the CCTV. The camera, it emerged, had been a decorative object since 2019.
So it continued. Mondays, usually. Sometimes a second one on Friday, as if the week had earned a bonus. Short poems, plain words, never signed. One about the milk packets sweating outside doors at dawn. One about the watchman's radio, and the old songs it plays to an audience of parked scooters. One, in June, about the mango seller who calls up at the balconies, and that one had a last line I carried around for days: he sells them by the dozen, but he is really selling July.
People began to linger... That is the only word for it.
Grown adults, briefcase people, letting an elevator go because they had two lines left. The girl from eleven read one aloud to her toddler, pointing at the words. The auditor from six was caught, by multiple witnesses, photographing a poem about fixed deposits and loneliness, and when confronted said gruffly that it was evidence.
It was evidence. It was evidence that seven hundred strangers stacked on top of each other will take any excuse to become a neighborhood.
Naturally, we tried to catch the poet. The building split into factions over suspects. The music teacher on nine, too obvious. The quiet bachelor on seventeen who received suspicious quantities of books by courier, that was me, and I can confirm I was innocent, though I have never enjoyed an accusation more. Someone proposed a sting operation involving the lobby at 5 a.m. Attendance was poor.
I did my own quieter detective work. The paper was always the same brand of weak-tea stationery. The typewriter, and it was a typewriter, dropped its lowercase e slightly below the line. And every single poem, I noticed around the fourth month, was about something you could only know if you were home all day. The milk packets at dawn. The 11 a.m. silence. The pigeons' afternoon shift. Whoever this was did not leave for an office.
Then, in August, the poems changed.
They got older, somehow. One about a cupboard that still holds saris nobody wears. One about cooking rice for one person after thirty-one years of cooking it for two, and how the hand refuses to learn the smaller measure. The elevator got very quiet the week that one went up. The toddler's mother pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling, the way you do.
I found him by accident, the way you find everything that matters. A power cut, a stalled elevator, and me taking the stairs from fifteen, where the physiotherapist lives, down past twelve, where a door stood open for the cross-breeze.
Inside... an old man at a dining table, one plate, one typewriter, and a stack of paper the color of weak tea.
Mr. Fernandes. Twelfth floor. Retired proofreader, forty years at a newspaper that no longer exists. His wife, Lucia, had died the previous winter. I knew none of this at the time. At the time I knew only that I stood in his doorway like a burglar with no plan, and that he looked up, saw my face, and understood instantly that the game was over.
"You will want tea," he said, "if you are going to be difficult about this."
The poems were hers.
That was the part I had not guessed. Lucia had written all her life, notebooks of it, decades of it, and shown almost no one, one of those writers nobody had heard yet, and now never would. After she died he found forty-one notebooks in the cupboard with the saris. He read them all twice. Then he sat with the terrible arithmetic of a life's work with an audience of one.
"I could not publish her," he said, "but I could not let her stay unread. So I published her to the building. Nineteen floors. It is not the world, but it is a circulation."
The typewriter was because her handwriting made him unable to work. The anonymity was because the poems deserved to be met as poems, not as sympathy. "If they knew a widower posted them," he said, "they would read a widower. This way they read her."
I kept his secret for eight months, right up to the morning he did not answer his door... and the building learned everything at once. At the funeral, which half the tower attended for a man most had never spoken to, the toddler's mother taped Lucia's mango poem inside the elevator, laminated this time.
Nobody took it down.
The auditor from six, of all people, proposed the amendment to the society rules, clause 11(d), which I have photographed and will keep forever: One poem may remain posted in the lift at all times. Content to rotate weekly. No approvals required.
The notebooks came to me, because I was the one who knew, and because his nephew in Toronto wanted the flat but not the cupboard. I have been typing them up slowly, one poem at a time, on evenings when the building is loud with other people's dinners. Some I put up in the elevator, keeping the rotation alive. The rest I have started posting on a community wall for poets, where strangers she never met leave comments under her lines, which is to say, her circulation is growing. I wrote a small piece about her for a series that runs profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I sent her mango poem to a monthly poetry contest under both their names, because a proofreader would insist on accurate attribution.
Grief works in strange directions. I only understood mine, for two people I barely knew, when I stopped typing Lucia's poems one night and wrote my own, badly, about a grief that had been waiting years for a form. The elevator taught me that. Fifty-one seconds is enough time to change a stranger, if the lines are true.
Last Monday a new poem appeared in the lift. Weak-tea paper. Handwritten this time, in a young, uncertain hand, four lines about the watchman's radio. It was not one of Lucia's... and it was not mine.
Floor by floor, the building is learning to speak.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.