Soft Graffiti

Together in Great Numbers

Everyone forgot how to ride the subway over the weekend. It only took three warm days and all the knots slackening in our shoulders as our bodies expanded into this newfound space. 

Until then I had thought each book spoke of things, human or divine, that lie outside of books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they speak among themselves. In light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was the place of a long, centuries old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another. A living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or been their conveyers.

• Umberto Eco, The Name Of The Rose

Overheard

A young boy at a restaurant yells out, ” I like guns!” His grandmother scolds, “We don’t like guns. Guns hurt people.” The boy looks over, “But guns give water to the flowers.”

Subway Spider

Cream and yellow, 

with eight crabbed legs like 

some monstrous molar swinging

into the Canal St. Station

Witch Hands

A wart on the back of the hand, root knuckle of the middle finger. That single blemish could have been a death sentence in times past. Toad holder. She had warts as a kid too, and her grandmom, usually so straight-laced and trusting of doctors, rubbed those warts with the clammy insides of raw potato skins which she buried in the yard of the summer house. It was very important that the burial location remain a secret, otherwise the cure would not have worked. Within weeks the warts had disappeared. Years later she decided it was the power of the mind, of total belief and wasn’t that some form of magic too?