the library (feat. Margo Seibert)

During the days

I'd drift through the rooms of my grandmama's house

Scuffling through closets and cupboards

Excavating her mad collection

Of knickknacks and relics and oddball curios

The house was packed

With hoardfuls of jewels and junk

Nautilus shells

Metal matchbox cars

Pamphlets and puzzles

And peculiar pastry tools

And a stunning exhibition

Of devil and dragon and demon figurines

Disturbing little icons

Gathered from all around the world.

There was this one cute green dragon that I loved

A pūķis.

Pook pook pook!

A Latvian household dragon that steals and hoards treasures for her master

Legend said if you didn't feed her for her services she would burn your house down

I named her Pookie and put her on my nightstand

Hello Miss Susan!

I have such wonders to show you!

Sweet precious trinkets and treasures!

Look here, look here, look here, look here!

Vinyl!

A cobwebbed closet full of stacks of dusty vinyl

And a Technics SP-10

I filled the house with music

I can play music

As loud as I want

There's no one to tell me to turn it down

I danced and screamed

I'm alone!

I'm alive!

I'm alright!

Hank Williams and Patsy Cline

Nine recordings of Winterreise

Billie Holiday, Blood on the Tracks

And Rumours

Listen to the wind blow

A curated collection for a broken heart

And books!

My god, this woman's books!

Every room, floor to ceiling

With stacks and stacks of books

Have you ever fallen in love with someone

By looking at their books?

But they were totally disorganized

Just chaos everywhere

My little OCD brain lit up

And I became a little librarian

Mmm yes please Miss Susan!

Tidy tidy tidy!

Pook pook pook!

Tidy tidy!

Pook pook pook!

Tidy tidy!

Fiction, fiction, non-fiction, non-fiction

Fiction, fiction, non-fiction, non-fiction

Latvian, Latvian, fiction, non-fiction

Fiction, non-fiction, Latvian, Latvian

Latvian, fiction, fiction, fiction

Non-fiction

Non-fiction?

Non-fiction is harder than fiction

After the first few days I had them separated by room

And then

It was time to alphabetize

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Nothing beats alphabetical order

A B C D

A B C D

A D G K J J H N M U

Atwood, Austen, Bronte and Bronte

Didion, Jackson

So much good stuff!

Butler, Lessing, Murdoch, Morrison, Oates

Wharton

And a surprising number of trashy romance novels

By Danielle Steel

There were men too

Mostly sci-fi guys, beats and poets

Bukowski, Cummings, Bradbury, Kerouac, Simic.

Poetry got its own section

Six solid shelves of thin modernist volumes.

No collected works, always the original editions

In some of the books

I would find newspaper clippings of obituaries

On Raymond Carver's she had written "a sad day"

"A sad day"

In green Sharpie

Plays—not that many plays

But non-fiction, oh man

Grandmama's interests were all over the place

Certain themes started to emerge

Landscape architecture, interior design

Animism, trickster myths, and fairy tales

Including several lavishly illustrated editions

Of the Three Little Pigs

Erotica and polyamory—grandmama!

Jungian psychology

Drugs and disease

Mental health

Autobiographies by people who'd tried to take their life

And biographies of people who did

Depression runs in my family

Depression and addiction

Miss Susan?

What's this?

I suppose I should also mention here

That during this time in Latvia

I had with me an absolutely atrocious amount of weed