The case is not a folder.
It is a temperature.
Something kept at 4°C so it does not confess too quickly.
Inside it, the poem has already separated from itself.
Not metaphorically—
physically.
One part is language, yes—flattened, obedient,
lined up like teeth in a jaw that no longer bites.
The other part is not legible.
It has folded inward, grown damp,
taken on the consistency of something that used to belong to a body
but was removed without ceremony.
It remembers pressure.
There are gloves involved. Always gloves.
Hands refuse direct contact with what the poem has become.
Not out of hygiene—
but because touch would rearrange it.
It is unstable in the way a face is unstable
after you realise you’ve been looking at it wrong your whole life.
Someone tries to read it.
The letters lift slightly, like skin reacting to cold air.
They do not stay in place.
A line break leaks.
Not ink—
but a thin, transparent substance
that carries the faint outline of something unsaid.
You can hold it up to the light
and see where the poem refused to continue.
That refusal is heavier than the rest.
The case file includes photographs.
In each one, the poem looks different.
In one, it is stretched thin across a surface,
as if it had been pulled apart carefully, lovingly,
until it stopped resisting.
In another, it has collapsed into itself,
a dense knot of language and something softer,
something that bruises when looked at too long.
There is no original state.
Only stages of handling.
The examiner writes:
“The subject shows signs of prior meaning.”
Not meaning—
signs of it.
As if meaning passed through once,
like a body through water,
and left only distortion behind.
At the margins, something grows.
Not commentary. Not interpretation.
A second text, but slower.
It does not use words.
It uses pressure, repetition, a kind of quiet insistence
that bends the page without marking it.
If you return to the poem after time,
this second text has advanced.
It has eaten small parts of the original.
Carefully. Without violence.
Like something that knows it will not be stopped.
There is a moment—never recorded—
where the poem becomes aware of being kept.
Not read. Not understood.
Kept.
In that moment, it changes temperature.
Warms.
Softens.
Becomes briefly, dangerously close
to being alive again.
The case is sealed after that.
Not because the investigation is complete—
but because it has begun to look back.
If you open it now,
you will not find the poem.
You will find the space it made
while trying to leave.
And that space—
still moving slightly,
still adjusting to the absence—
is the most accurate version
we have.