(after “Thought a Rarity on Paper” by Billy Collins)

Here I am, looking at this copy of a
two hundred-dollar book.
Avante-Garde Fashion of the 1980s: NYC
(Taschen, 2023),
a hundred all-color pages on 60-lb uncoated stock.

Limited to 1,000 copies,
you plucked it from the shelf
and placed it on the Barnes & Noble cafe table.

You set the book beside a stack of magazines,
from Vogue to German Vanity Fair,
atop stacks of New Release novels
whose first pages you thought it would be
fun to skim.

But first, you greet the barista and
order a $5.50 coffee as entree
to an afternoon flipping pages, browsing
and seeing what one can see
for free, pressing the art book pages flat,
rendering the margins visible to the stitches.

There, as you sipped and sipped,
and checked your phone for texts
and crush candy and take Starby selfies
while crimping thumb marks into the flawless face of
Ana de Armas on the cover of an imported copy of Grazia.

You spent half an hour arranging it all,
making sure that the visible titles were a mix of
Reese book picks and celeb mags to ensure:
this Insta post is faveable in 0.8 seconds.

In truth, I pitied you,
as it was clear that
words didn’t matter as much as image and
perception–not even yours, but–“yours”
as witnessed by your 204 followers,
most of whom are pornbots hoping for a follow,
but that’s how you get your start.

You pawed the Vonnegut reprint,
and I hoped you would
read and learn something, but
you skimmed the title page,
like the first ten seconds of
a TikTok you scrolled through mid-sip.

Then you got another text
that gave you a dopamine grin
as you dog-eared page two of a hardcover Grisham.

NowTENSEit’s time to wrench
crack crack crack open the
spine because the sound is so ASMR.

And here I sit,
mentally tallying the retail cost of
what you leave behind,

mourning that these works of art
will end up returned and remaindered or pulped
because a book or magazine that has been

scrunched and wadded and folded,
creased and crimpled and crimped
won’t sell at full price, like a pound puppy
abused one too many times,
just enough that its innate beauty is buried,
alienating anyone who could have loved it,
condemning it to permanent solitude.

December 13, 2025