Featured Image: Lacie Slezak

This birthed body

Put upon the library shelf.

Fiction or non-

          The perpetual, rhetorical question.

They selected me 

From the self-help section.

Checked me out – 

          The librarian peering over the rim of rosary-red glasses.

The first few chapters read.

A closer study needed, so rules were broken by

          Highlighter pens and

                                                  Scribbled margins.

Later, altogether lost under

          Piles of papers to grade and

                                                              Petitions to sign.

                               Birthday cake smudges.

                                                                                Menstrual blood and tears.

Empty spaces erased the final chapters.

Decades later.

Self is found in the transformation to Body;

          Loose binding

          Wrinkled pages

          Round belly

          Achy hips

          Hair loss

          Loss I can manage because I already have, and        

          Now this book owns her own library.