i believe in letters. at the moment, i believe in the v, for vixen, vantage, and volatile. reading is a virus, plagues me in my sleep. all my books grow lips in the night and whisper from the shelf. they have all fallen in love with me and with each other. they paint my dreams in underwater maps, rearrangements of lines, squishy stolen internal organs, wispying trees. they move me on a paper sailboat, or sail me through the forest on a red-flyer wagon. they banish me to a makeshift igloo on the roof or to clutching my talons to the tail of a kite, sailing over the city. they arrange themselves according to hue and binding.
all the vintage books of poetry are hunkered together like antique architecture, all their lovely invisible cobwebs strung from one to the next like old clotheslines between buildings. on this one hangs an empty nightgown, between these two a pair of gnats, wound. this one has a rust-colored maple leaf suspended in mid-air, time-stopped between creased covers, speckled in gold, all of it. backbones balanced upright in history to make meaning between. these books are patient doorframes. i spin their pages like a map of the world. i am the woman of myths and bullshit. these books are my piled lovers, pulling me, limbering me, breathing me, believing me, teaching me the papery secrets to dreaming.
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