The library has a floor built from tapping feet.
Taptaptap and they all live on the next wooden desk
covered in years of bizarre writings.
Bush did 9/11, let American auto industry fail,
a construction used to enslave the vulgar.
One is whispering her importances
to the dirty windows–they pronounce velocity and acceleration
like the colors of trees slowly fading.
I share a window with four feet.
Not one corner belongs.
When, ever, can we abandon the tapping,
the wordless questions of names? Names like
passion. Motivation, pursuit of knowledge.
The buildings hold, not brick but stonekeep of memory,
the place where a chemistry professor was shot,
where students labor away in prison rooms
whispering their worries
to the glass fume hoods, titrations and spectroscopy and suspension.
It all floats up into the vent
never to be seen again.
The traveling feet on bricks, the throngs, return home
for another nothing of an evening.
Maybe cabbage for dinner today.
Maybe instead of living, breathing.
Sometimes we come back to the first moment we got here,
before we knew our feet
would establish our place in things.
Silently creeping, we lost our ground. Our whispers grew
with the dawning winter, and harrowed streets;
four suicides in a semester. Surrendered ourselves to the windows.
Would the sky ever write our thoughts, I don’t know.
Every story is like this one,
coming up from some shit town
expecting it all to change here.
Here where the bricks reverberate our traumain the echoing footsteps,
telling the world when we learned of irrelevance.
It was here in this library made of solitude.
It was here nobody belonged
while the sun in the sky was as finite
as existence. To be existence in the library
with tapping floors and empty windows is to have
eyes full of nothing, swirling around in the fables,
until the moment when the feet tap together and
we see each other for just an instant. We are alive,
aware of the tapping, and then we are swallowed again.
Cara Swirski is a student at UNC Chapel Hill studying chemistry with the goal of attending pharmacy school. She is a coxswain for the rowing team and head of Internal Affairs for Carolina Cancer Association. This is her first publication and she is excited to continue her writing journey.