The LibrarianShe reads the Atlas of World Languages in Dangerof Disappearing while on lunch break. With turkeysandwich in hand she types a note in her phone:Experts expect 90% of the world's approximately7,000 languages will become extinct in the next 100 years.She thinks linguists build houses they can't affordto finish. She thinks in theory, we will make it outalive, the monsters under her bed are outdated,they speak pidgin and bleed alphabet soup.She garbles words so the monsters don't get her,can't locate the whereabouts of her body in the dark.On her nightstand rests: A Street in Bronzeville.She plays word search puzzles in neighborhoodsof vocabulary before the night swallows her whole.The librarian is not the Spanish princess in Pan'sLabyrinth. She is Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin.She spect she grow'd. She don't think nobody ever made her.Autopsy comes from the Greek autopsia meaning:a seeing for oneself. In her bed, when she makes loveshe dissects the sounds, peels each syllable noteby note, deconstructs the prosody nail head bynail head, until the clippings litter the omniscientfloor--already a wasteland, all the floorboardspages of poetry in blank verse.On Sundays sitting in coffee shops she wondersif a computer can write a poem, if a machine has aconscious. She finds the mouths of men stag(nant)sees them as horned beasts in their verbalizing.Don't just talk about it, be about it, she contends.She is from the show-me-state and people fromMissouri like to compromise. They bring slaves inwicker baskets to picnics. The accompanying slicesof watermelon only serve to suggest sincerity.Today the librarian learned that only humans can pickup on sarcasm instinctively, that AI has yet to graspthese finer nuances. The librarian lives in the grey,she never mistakes what it looks like for what it is.The Turing Test serves as her bible. She has better thingsto do than watch the eyes of people move who don't love her.To love is to fear by choice and fear is a particular religion.Keep your day job, the professor had told her. You could nevermake a living as a poet. But this is good work, she thoughtplacing the black spines back in order, cuppingmouths of things that need to be shelved.She believes every throat is a call number.She puts each one back where it belongs:808.02 C449T:E, 810.98 M882P, 814.54 L867SHer mother taught her, you should never looka gift horse in the mouth so instead she feelsinside their covers. She was named withouther consent. Pandora means: the girl with all the gifts. Skinning Ghosts AliveIn the beginning, there is no yes.The amniotic sac a dust jacketfor the book of trauma. One plus one makes one.There is a nomenclature to this math, a methodto the madness of creation. There is no he.There is no she. There's just a girl expellingY from her loose jowl maw. The residue of jargonstaining her lips boy red. We are never our own.This is why we are so lonely. Why lightheaded starsnestle their knives in the sky's black chest. Why weeat men like air. Celestial bulb expelled like hangnailcurved as comma. Straight as the line reading youyour missing period and the knowing that this statementcannot be allowed to continue. This belly not permittedto raise a question. Even lightening shakes the earth by itsarms. Who am I to object? Point fingers at the order.//I was born bad. A train of yeses parading roundmy hip's border. A trail of forget-me-nots sproutingfrom my Father's chin. This tongue needs shepherding,as do the bones. I clench and carry the pain of my Motherin my teeth, at the root a canal of fear. The space betweeneach molar the size of the closet door my grandmother'smother locked her in as she cried no promising that shewould be good. So naturally my mouth's second nature isnaughty. This is how you end up leading the shell of a manto your bed. How you crack your peanut colored selfuntil the sidewalk of your cheeks are caked with salt in April.Your lover's eyelids half-lit houses with terror veining their waydown the stairs. It is cold in this thing we call a body.Who will tend to the fire with so few hands to go around?//Even snakes lose themselves in their skin.Their life's throat peeled back in molting song.A second me lies somewhere on the ground.Hollowed as the cicada shells I collected in the woodsas a child. Knowing even then that the anatomy of losswas worth picking, even if only to acknowledge thatsomething has shed and not died, something brown as mehas left its skeleton behind, more perfectly intact than broken,as if to say we are livingand dying just the same.This is why we are so homesick,why we hull ourselves in shadows.Self-Portrait of Librarian with T.S. Eliot's PapersIn the year 2020, T.S. Eliot's papers will be unsealed.Let us go then, you and I. Let us take the dust inour claws, lap the hundreds of letters spilling secretsinto the waste land of our irreverent mouths.Have we no couth? Have we not been trainedto know good things come to those who wait?Each year we gather 'round the cave. We don our Sun-day best, come to see what young muse has risenfrom the dead. Tomorrow brings the past wrappedin plastic eggs, the seal of history broken in present tense.Storage units preserve our culture's haunted houses.The canon is merely a ghost story. Write a poem after mebefore I'm gone, and please do not include rest in peace,only those that are forgotten go undisturbed, only thingskept in the dark know the true weight of light. Excerpted from Library of Small Catastrophes by Alison C. Rollins All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
