The frailty of memory. The permanence of loss.
When writing becomes bullshit —maybe it’s time to step aside.
The first time he saw a dead body, he was ten.
He ran from the apartment as fast as he could.
Then he sat down to dinner.
Then he ran out again to find Mrs. Rubin, to tell her her husband was on the living room floor.
Later that day, men from the city came
and carried the body away in a zipped-up black bag.
Though he and his friends went to the movies every Saturday,
shooting each other with fingers and stick guns,
pretending to be cowboys and outlaws,
he had never seen a real dead body.
After that,
his early teenage years became a blank space.
Years later,
working in the stacks of the New York Public Library,
he retrieved exotic brittle volumes for strangers waiting
in the cavernous reading room.
Books no one else had touched in decades.
He had never been so close to so many books.
Swimming through library stacks slowed down time.
He called it book-crawling — hours spent drifting through secondhand shops.
It still offered pleasure.
Still offered respite.
The United States in 2025 is not Germany in 1933.
This is our own uncomfortable moment.
Our own reality.
There are bold pronouncements.
Revised curricula, missing paragraphs,
book titles erased from syllabi
with the tap of a touchscreen.
Books challenged by committees.
Books taken from shelves.
Stories lost.
Names erased.
Writers need to write anyway.
Not because it will last,
but because it must be said
before it disappears.