My dog noses the bookshelf like she’s picking her next read. Eventually she fixates on one, flings it to the ground, paws it. I ask her to leave it. She gives a dog-huff and saunters off. The book is Murakami, borrowed from a friend. In fact, every book bumped is borrowed by someone she’s met. And I’m over-thinking it, but with a nose like that, she’s reading fingerprints. She’s reading hand scents. A catalogue of oils and hands and people who read what I read and shared the same constructed reality, there, in the perfumed pages. When she was a puppy, she wouldn’t stop gnawing on George Eliot, an older edition, antique. I spent so much time in Middlemarch, hovering over sentences I’d cried into, sentences others cried into. Remnants of skin locked in the binding, maybe the odor of used book stores is history, our history. We take the story, the story takes us. What can this pup read between? What stories has she unwittingly unlocked, nosing books, and sauntering off? Who else have I been sitting with, all this time?
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 6.
Nicolette Ratz is a Wisconsin-raised poet, naturalist, and seasonal worker. Recently, she alternated between conducting research for an organic cranberry farm (and getting wet pushing cranberry boats for harvest) and assisting climate science on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Her poetry explores liminal spaces, mushroom shadows, isolation, and dream-speak, with a particular interest in integrating myth and science. But you can also find her jotting down jokes or spinning wool.
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