By Taylor May Hagenbucher
The book with no front or back cover,
covered only by a Ziplock bag in my room.
Pages, with only a spine.
Years have not been kind to most of my grandmother’s things.
If only I could have,
I would have kept all of her pieces
“worth keeping”
in a glass box. Airtight.
(So, everything.)
“I don’t want to even think of this,
but could you imagine how much
this book would be worth if it were taken care of?” My aunt
holds the copy of Hamlet from 1905 in her hands,
its bible-thin pages disintegrating to nothing
between her long, pointed fingers.
What’s worth more are the seeds planted between pages,
the fingerprints my grandmother left,
waiting for mine to fit perfectly over.
Taylor May Hagenbucher is a senior at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, majoring in Secondary English Education and Creative Writing. If you ask her about either of those things, she will talk for hours.
