Keith Woodruff
Bookworms
WORM 1. A dried blood smear on page 39. Rust colored. Likely paper cut. Have seen bloody nose blood dried; it’s always more perfectly round. Two or three drops like a polka dots that fell before the reader could reach for the nearest tissue or shirt sleeve then smeared over the words come play.
WORM 2. Cigarette smoke. Again. Jesus, it’s always the Russians. Notes to the Underground, Death of Ivan Illyich, every time I get Russian Lit it comes reeking of cigarettes. Is this the work of one chain-smoking madman obsessed with Russian literature? I turn the pages cautiously, expecting ashes to fall into my lap. The stories are beautiful, but dreary enough without the threat of second hand smoke vapors giving me reader’s cancer.
WORM 3. Dear ungentle reader, dear patron before me, I am reading this book of poetry to know the poet better, not you and how your mind works or doesn’t work, but I have no choice now as you have chosen to make notes throughout the book. You write: Metaphor! Symbolism? Throughout the slim volume I see your comments as you work to unbaffle yourself. You are a bad patron. If I were a librarian I would constantly shush you.
WORM 4. A hair on page 182. If the title of the book made this discovery some how ironic I would mention it. It is not obvious like an eyelash, or strict like a nose hair. More curly. A chest hair. Maybe a pubic hair, though it’s hard, but not impossible, to imagine what must happen for a pubic hair to wind up in a book. I never read in the nude. Note: Crafting with Cat Hair has just arrived via interlibrary loan. Coincidence?
WORM 5. A short list of worms: a university bookstore receipt from 16 years ago, when the book was $5.95. Squashed bugs. This seems intentional. Boogers. This is definitely intentional, and usually in history books. Bookmarks. It's hard to leave these, but I do. I was especially fond of the one with a Japanese mural of cranes flying. Newspaper clippings. Obits. Marriage announcements. Sepia tone photos, inscriptions on the back. Once, reading Hemmingway, so out of the deep blue was the scribbled on grocery receipt I found between the páginas, that I©you, Tiff in big swoopy letters, remains a favorite part of The Old Man and the Sea. Always I leave these for the next reader.
WORM 6. This morning, in a book on sea anemones, on the page celebrating the pink sand-rose sea anemone, which looks like a squiddish fright wig, and which is found primarily in the Pacific, I find a ticket stub for a train to California.
So Much Entering
In Kalamazoo, there are three kinds of Velvet Touch: a car wash, a dry cleaner, and a handjob.
I am working part-time in a small used bookstore, which is really just a house that has been converted into a shop. From the window, I can see the Velvet Touch adult arcade across the street. In the parking lot, rain is falling on three empty pickups right now. That image - a soft-porn infused haiku. All day, men come and go. Enter empty, leave empty.
There is no shop cat in the window or on the register to keep me company. All day, the string of bells on the door jingles as women come and go with bagfuls of romance novels. Taped to the door front, written in black marker, is an 8 1/2 X 11 piece of paper that reads ENTER HERE.
I spend the hours unpacking bags, reading a few passages now and then. Restocking shelves. On every book cover, a swain or rogue looking at her with stern passion as if to say, Rejoice, for I will soon enter you. She returns his gaze, Yes, rejoicent am I that you will soon enter me. The pages are alive with rampant entering. He enters her chamber. Her dreams. He enters her hut, her tent. On the covers, bodices pawed asunder, swan lithe necks laid bare for feasting, and inside, that moment of surrender when he enters her.
I have been directed to leave the radio on the soft rock station. I hear Air Supply Lost in Love a lot and don't know why I always hated it. There are days when I feel delirious with gratitude to have found what so many are still looking for, days I am sure you created my life, invented me in the pages of your novel. Only there, I am a lumbering bear and you the sun I walk under endlessly.
Keith Woodruff lives in San Antonio, TX with a backyard full of moody tomato plants. His poetry has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Sundog Lit, New World Writing Quarterly and RAWHEAD. His flash and micro writing appeared in lovely places like Wigleaf, Does it Have Pockets, JMWW, HAD and is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Heavy Feather Review and FlashFlood. Read him in Best Small Fictions 2017and 2019 and at www.keithawoodruff.com. He was awarded a 2018 Pushcart Prize. @keithwoodruff.bsky.social
