A blank sheet of paper falls out of a stack of printing paper.
Its lack of use at the moment stares at her.
She shuffles it back where it belongs. It begs for a poem.
She insists, “Not now.” When, begs the paper.
She ignores it, warn-whispers, “I’m at work,
hush, this is a library.” The paper rattles, offended,
demands, at least use me for an overdue notice.
She shushes. She’s not normally a shushing kind of librarian.
Shushing went out of stock in the 1970s,
before she was born, back when women librarians
wore high frilly collars, ate silence for breakfast.
She writes poems about homeless people entering the library,
some flashing her in the library stacks.
Just yesterday, a woman off her meds made a scene
about the Curious George book in the children’s section.
Now, this blank paper is wrinkling its face.
Use me for art class at Storytime, suggests the paper.
Let kids color me cheerful. Scribble their dreams on me.
“Hush,” she warns again in the undertone
they only teach in library school, along with
how to change the date due stamp. The paper wants
to be folded into a paper airplane, aimed at the man
with a bald spot landing strip. He’s a board member.
She finds some books mischievously re-shelving themselves.
What’s the point of Dewey Decimals if no one notices?
She daydreams of placing books about dogs among Romance,
history between Science Fiction, dinosaurs in Tree Identification.
The paper suggests it could be a flyer for a poetry reading.
She smiles, like only librarians can smile
when discovering a rare book in the discard section,
a kind of tut-tut smile, and tells the paper,
“Now you’re talking.”