What? Ten in the morning and already hungry for books? What would you like? A petite chapbook, a pick-me-up travel log, or something heavier, a novel like the spaghetti and cream sauce my daughter used to eat for breakfast? I show the guy at the front counter my backpack. He waves me in.
I know where I’m going. I need a quiet place to sit down and write. My teaching schedule is changed to eleven o’clock and I have an hour to kill. Can’t go into a cafe. Yesterday’s delicious iced Hong Kong milk tea kept me up all night. Besides, cafes are too noisy. It’s good for people watching but I never write anything coherent listening to the espresso machine.
The Poetry Room feels like an attic of a house. Only three women are there browsing. I move a chair next to the half-opened window. The sun is gentle and the air fresh. Within a few moments I’m sucked into my note book and notice relatively little of what’s happening around me. The floor creaks now and then. Footsteps, whispers, rustle of pages. I look up to a baby bouncing on the back of a young mother checking out a shelf of titles. Both happy. I am too, in possession of a new poem.
