Breath

The book is breathing I can see it, it's muscled, riveted chest rising and falling like a flame I can't see its eyes, but i know its watching me

No one else i know breathes. no one has time No one I know is brave enough to breathe They fear what will happen if the stop long enough to exhale

I dont breathe, though I have the time If I breathe, fragments of my sorrow will be exhaled into the world like the plague Instead I stopper it inside this moving flask Its walls glassy and cold Stock-still as my polluted breath circulates Thrashing at the edges of my patience

But this book is breathing For the first time in months, I encounter a breathing thing

And I think: What is happening, that the first sign of breath in this grieving home Is from an inanimate object? Why has this endeniable characterisitc of life only shared between these yellowing pages and splitting spine? So I sit with this living, breathing book, and allow it to hold me in a papery embrace A frail gesture of loving support I sit amongst them all on my bookshelf And I listen to their united breath, a family of ink, and union of pages

These books have a famiy I could never have So I sit with them, and I pretend to hear breath from these broken, plain, non-living objects Just so im not alone I am a teenage girl Crouching crookedly on a sagging shelf The result of desperate lonliness, ready to be taken in, converted into just another dusty object on the shelf.