The Reader

I had, as a child, the nasty habit of eating words right off the

page: whole rows of letters—even the angel-tipped serifs—

nibbled; the tiny curl ends of j and y, which gathered like

toast crumbs in the bindings, licked clean. My gaze would

fall on any phrase and falling—instinctively —grab hold;

holding naturally turned to tasting, tasting to chewing and so

forth. It seemed harmless enough. I was a child. Yet knowing

how memory serves its master, maybe I was rough or rude?

Why else would my sisters run to our mother complaining

that I’d erased their books again? Perhaps I gobbled and

gulped and wore the stains of gluttony on my face; where I’d

see myself a myopic visionary with the appetite of an escape

artist, they’d remember a greedy know-it-all who grabbed

their wishes before they could know them.

Truly mine was an indiscriminate hunger—the ubiquitous

cereal boxes, my mother’s novels—but the books my sisters

chose, or had assigned to them, did seem particularly…

available. I got there first, cracking spines like wishbones,

leaving pages splotched with grease, turning them opaque,

translucent when held to the light: they could have seen

what remains after reading, but I didn’t have the words to tell

them.
‍ ‍Basic Writing
A minor bravery of words
taping themselves to the page
thin bodies sticky with effort, letters
crawling up each other’s spines, then sprawled
distant as one arc of an o from another.
A language called forth by there’s no call for that.

Nouns will probably get in their way: too many
griefs to startle cry, timbre sloughed at the margin line.

Ants might be the better subject: communal
survivors herding aphids into winter burrows
aphids of memory serving a hungry purpose
words like ants surfacing before rain.