Book Drop Tide

The slot is a small mouth in the brick, breathing in the last bus fumes, accepting the weight of our borrowed hours with a soft metallic vowel.

Inside, a bell nudges the dark, books tumble like shy coins into the bin; a map of fingerprints opens its folds, margin notes flutter, dry moth-wings.

Somewhere a clerk will lift them at dawn, smelling rain and cafeteria coffee, stacking the spines into a slow parade back toward their shelves of quiet weather.

The street keeps turning its pages of light, headlights erase and rewrite the asphalt. We leave what we read where the tide returns it, to be found again, calm as a doorway.