Each Friday at Good Letters we feature a poem from the pages of Image, selected and introduced by one of our writers or readers. Is there any place more melancholy to spend Christmas morning than a hotel room? A place designed to be no place at all? Yet it’s strangely fitting: the mystery of the…

On the day after Thanksgiving my dad would disappear into the attic while I waited at the foot of the ladder for him to bring them down. One by one, I wiped the dust from their crowns. We had the full set in faded plastic, melted in spots from summer storage in the Louisiana heat:…