Mary Buchinger

Librairie Jules Verne, Paris

A woman on her stool,
(where is her cat? bookshops
in Paris have cats, Rilke said)
studies the screen of her phone,
the floor at her feet flooded
with books, shelves awry,
tables heaped, each precarious
stack varied as a city, hard covers
edged with gold filigree 

The woman and I are flesh
among these words that rise
like bubbles from the boil,
and I, extraneous, enmeshed,
leagues and leagues from home,
find in the top right corner
of each first page, the penciled
price of paper and imagination

The great chandelier of the ages
has fallen in this place, shattered
into words, serpentine waves
heave against the walls
Where’s the light?
The laundering sun’s
gone missing as books mold
in this marooned room
How else to tell our time
to strangers, to say, I lived,
I spelled my name with
these many letters

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Mary Buchinger is the author of eight collections of poetry; her most recent books are There Is Only the Sacred and the Desecrated (2026, Paul Nemser Book Prize Honorable Mention, Lily Poetry Review Books), Navigating the Reach (Honors, 2024 Massachusetts Book Award, Salmon Poetry), The Book of Shores (2024) and Virology (2022) both from Lily Poetry Review Books. Her work appears in AGNI, Plume, Salt Hill, Seneca Review and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in linguistics and teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. www.MaryBuchinger.com.