“Pencils come from Pennsylvania.”
Blossom Dearie

Rotring
A drafting pencil never gets dull,
But it’s never that sharp, either.

Blackwing
Many men claim to have
God’s pencil
Some have his eraser.
Others believe God’s pencil has no eraser.
Still others believe there is no God
So not even an eraser.
Not even the small dried out kind
That smears and rips and stains.

Staedtler
Lead pencils never contained lead.
They’re graphite, the most chastely
Non-interactive form of carbon
while lead bonds promiscuously with anything.
Soft graphite and hard clay are
Powdered to sludge, sculpted into perfect cylinders.
Baked to 1800°F, the temperature of volcanic vents
On the ocean bottom.
Then they’re hidden in grooved cedar.
Covered in 5 layers of yellow paint,
finally inked or foil stamped.
A work-intensive instrument
with the heart of a golem.

Castell
Stealing pencils doesn’t count.
Everybody does it.

Cedar Pointe
John Wick killed three men with a pencil,
But the TSA allows pencils and pencil sharpeners
On airplanes,
Probably because John Wick is not on your plane.

Ticonderoga
Big Box stores put their names on pencils
But they don’t make the pencils themselves.

Faber
When I was five, I stabbed my hand
With a sharp No. 2. I don’t know why.
I remember, my right hand outstretched
Like Isaac awaiting Abraham,
Awaiting a sign that never came.
I did what Abraham never did
My left hand accelerating in a parabola.
A graphite dot remains.

Prismacolor
HB stands for ‘Hard Black’
Drawing pencils have HB grades,
Not simple numbers, no coordinated scale.
Every maker creates their own.

Tombow
I stopped drawing when I was thirteen
Because my father was an art teacher
And had nothing good to say about my work.
He used things I created as doorstops.

Lyra
It’s illegal to use a pencil
To fill out a hospital form or chart
Because you can erase graphite.
But you can’t really.
Graphite lasts billions of years,
longer than all inks or any laws,
longer than anything,
all the way to the end of everything.

Richard Pels’ short stories are in the current issues of Post Road Magazine, Sunday SalonZine and Libre. His libretto for the opera Suit premiered at the NYU First Performance Series. His poetry and prose have appeared in The Northwest Review, The Little Magazine and The Wisconsin Review. Two novels and a screenplay are in the works. He freelances and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. His MFA is from the University of Oregon where he studied with Ralph Salisbury.