Margin Notes

A bookmark slides from pages, years compacted in its crease— coffee ring on chapter three, someone's pencil in the margin.

The due date stamped in blue, a ghost of intention, the way a life leaves fingerprints on spines it passes through.

Returned too late, returned too early, each book a conversation we abandoned, underlines beneath the passages that meant something, once.

We shelve ourselves in libraries, our hands touching what others held, reading the impressions of their reading, the pressed flowers they forgot to claim.