Too Fond of Books
J. C. Runolfson
He smiled when I told him love's a new book,
called me Gutenberg, asked me to print him
large so none would need their glasses to look.
He posed in bed, said he could not be slim
and small, a volume once read on a whim.
He wanted to be cherished, savored slow
read obsessively, pages touched like skin.
I pressed him down, caressed him by the glow
of candlelight, then took his measure so.
In sleep he dreamt sweet words he'd wake to say
but I could read them in his ink-blood's flow.
A new book out of old love will not stray.
When lonely, I take him down from my shelf,
kiss his leaves, read his devotion myself.
J. C. Runolfson's work has appeared in Goblin Fruit previously, Lone Star Stories, Sybil's Garage, and Strange Horizons, to name a few. She is also an assistant editor for Flash Me Magazine. Most of her poetry is free-form, but she thought sonnets might be fun to try.
She reads online a lot, which means following interesting links from the reading list of her journal. Currently, she's also re-reading Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds and the poetry of T. S. Eliot for comfort reading. Her favorite kind of weather is a heavy fog and drizzle in the morning that turns into a steady, muffling rainfall throughout the day, through which the fog horn comes like the forlorn ghost of some lost leviathan. This would explain why San Francisco is her favorite of the cities she's lived in.
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