Poetry

“Marginalia in a Borrowed Book”

It was never the words themselves,
but the spaces you favored—
the margins where ink hesitates,
where meaning leans just enough
to become something else.

You read differently from the rest of us—
not for story, but for fracture,
tracing the faintest disruptions
as though the text had always intended
to be undone.

There are annotations I do not recall making,
yet there they are—
precise, deliberate, unmistakably intimate—
as if the page had learned my voice
through repetition not my own.

And still, you turn each leaf so gently,
never creasing what you keep—
a careful reader, yes,
though I have begun to wonder
who, in fact, is being read.

So I have stopped writing in certain places,
left whole chapters untouched—
not out of absence,
but in quiet recognition
that some books are studied
only to discover where they break.