Tara Deal

The End of an Editor in a Secondhand Bookshop

The words are all wrong–ignore them
        for a moment–
among the columns, like ruins, misaligned.

The images are smudged
with blurred thinking and ink

plus there’s too much space

between lines.
One struggles

to find the right title–
no, epitaph, some phrase
from that story you loved
all your life–
before the tall, old shelves
collapse like sequoias, struck
by lightning

and it’s hard to believe
everyone has just arrived, smack

in the middle of the travel section
overstuffed with outdated guidebooks to places
never quite visited
and now

it’s too late, of course,
        spines crack,
               things go
                      out of print,

and no one calls out
for Ceylon, for example,
        or even recalls it
as hands slip
        over volumes.

Author Bio

Tara Deal is a writer and editor in New York City. Her poetry has appeared in magazines such as failbetter, Flyway, nthposition, and West Branch, and she is the author of the poetry chapbook Wander Luster (Finishing Line Press). Her novella, Palms Are Not Trees After All, won the 2007 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize from Texas Review Press. The shortest story she’s ever written appears in Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer (Norton). Find her online at www.taradeal.com.