What She Carried Every Sunday

The box said BOOKS. I reached past a dictionary,

past a paperback with its spine gone soft,

and found the cloth cover — red along the edges,

a name in pencil. I held it aloft,

then set it at my waist. Heavier

than expected. Not metaphor —

dense paper, compressed for decades.

I don't go to church. I've closed that door

in myself and left it. I know the form:

the standing, sitting, words worn smooth

by repetition past their meaning

into something structural. The groove

it wears into a life. The room was bare.

The neighbor in the kitchen with a bag.

I stood there with both hands under the book,

not opening it. No internal flag

for prayer, no practice. Just

her name in pencil, faint but there.

I read it once. I set it in the pile.

Lifted the next box. The air

of the apartment settling around us.

I drove home. My hands remembered it —

that heft, that name, the red-edged pages.

The weight of what she carried. I haven't placed it yet.