Foraging the Library for No Love Without Poetry

Of course, it’s empty now, the library, besides 
glass blown from window frames, books 
warped & torn over years of weather bursting 
into the dark building. Doom & I release hands
like we always do when taking stock of a new place, 
or an old one made new by storms, as we step 
through one of these shattered portals
& don thick welding gloves found in a puddle 
near a gutted metal shop. Doom’s fingers 
don’t reach the tips of the gloves, meant for 
craftsmen now dead or somewhere easier
to survive. How old do you want her to be?
She has my imagination & will be a better poet, 
because she sees the library as it once was, years 
before her birth: students with bags slouched
by their chairs, an employee wheeling a cart
of books, some new, some musty, a few toppling 
onto the carpet of fluorescent-lit rows. These 
last-born children gave way for Doom, the first
of this world. We’ve come here, as it stands today, 
because she is curious of my past, I her future.
Ariadna, my only hope to learn what might happen 
to a daughter who has just words to eat
lies somewhere beyond this halo of shattered glass.
We tiptoe over it, thankful to be someplace quiet
that was always meant to be. The suggestion of sunlight 
guides us as we turn corners from the once-windows
& pry open doors, prop them with whatever we can find 
so as not to get entombed behind them. We climb
stairs until we find stacks less troubled, but still,
everything is fragments now. I peel a book
from the floor, welded open to a page in the middle, 
tilt it toward the dusty glow of the stairwell
to read to her: you got there first: beautiful [

Read more from Issue 19.2.