Literature is one of the saddest roads to everything.
Andre Breton
The beige-painted walls, last year’s calendar in that memorized spin across the weeks. The days of sandwiches uneaten, undrunk tea the cleft of your chin over this volume you palpitate into seizure to read aloud. But do this, acolytes, before the hardback priest dissolves into his peopled canon of light, which never dims or fails to guard our lopsided library. Oh, frightened library, rise from the clatter of your stacks. We aspire to your shelves, to stand with Homer, Ulysses, our own swords drawn, dripping to dismember the deadbolt, circulation’s grassy membrane before shovel and worm swallow our entrails, too. You must Prevail! (This, of course, after the other side has long warned us, has fallen out of print)
Bobby Parrott
Bobby Parrott earned his MFA in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University. His poems appear or are upcoming in Preface, Grubstreet, Spoon River, Landfill, Poetic Sun, Star*Line, Stick Figure Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. Immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado with his house plant Zebrina, and his wind-up robot Nordstrom.