March 11, 2025Pangaea in Her
It’s every writer’s favorite smell,
like Barnes and Noble
or hole-in-the-wall used book stores—
paper and pages
wedged in between whiffs
of nostalgia, dust moths
and memories,
the faint, woody smell
of the distant forest it came from.
Even new books smell like the old
days and somewhere else—
another time, another place.
I remember my library card,
my mother encouraging me to go
but then feeling frustrated
when I wouldn’t want to leave.
I wanted to be like Matilda,
make my own pancakes,
calculate impossible math problems
in my head, and it seemed
that reading was clearly the answer
to learning telekinesis. I remember
my toddlerhood, sitting butterfly legs
on a tattered blanket
waiting to watch fireworks
in a crowded park on the 4th of July.
A group of teenagers were throwing
Hostess Ding Dongs at each other,
and not only did I want one,
but I saw the way one of the girls
laughed at the boys in slow motion,
her straight hair closed like curtains
on her face as she twisted
her upper body away,
pretending not to like it, pretending
to be annoyed, her pink tank top
lifting above her hip bones
as her unzipped hoodie slipped
from her shoulder, revealing
her bare skin like drifting continents
among an ocean of clothes
that beg to be pulled
when a little, metallic flying saucer
fell directly in my cross-legged lap.
She can have it,
the girl told my parents,
but how I knew I made it happen
with a yearning. How I knew
that somehow Matilda summoning
desserts was actually about me,
and how I knew that one day,
I would flirt with boys and fall in love
and that the smell of books
and wordy forests
would sing to me like summer rain,
your favorite thing, your favorite thing.
Prompt: Write a poem that includes a memory you’ve never shared. Include dialogue.