Just a Mote on a Spine

by Amy Kuta

I am in the old library

and all I can think about is

making out with you among the musty books.

Backs up against titles you would like:

The Memoirs of God

Manual of Canon Law

The Roots of Tantra.

We could absorb the words through

their dust and our sweat.

Absorb The First Age of Christianity.

I bet there’s some steamy stuff in that.

We’d become bursting with knowledge and lust

then press against the 1970s serigraphs of produce:

eggplants tumbling into buggies,

whole slices of watermelon torn and missing.

You could hold me against the art

and I would absorb the fruit,

as I have absorbed each word you’ve given me.

Your hands interlocking my hands,

holding me so that I don’t know where I am:

not a student

not a mother

not an inhabitant of this third-floor library.

Just a mote on a spine of a book we are writing.