The Attic Bedroom

In the pink house on █████, I wheatpasted book pages to the wall with the windows. Four parts water, one part flour. The book I chose isn’t important. Someone else’s words: printed, bound, sold, torn out, glued up. The thing about wheatpasted book pages is how alluring they are to silverfish. At night I would come home to find a handful of them on the wall, struggling to find a corner of a page to crawl under. Then I’d smash their nickel-gray bodies with whatever was nearby, and leave them there—a warning to the others.

Every night, the west-facing wall writhing,
the awful things feeding,
slowly eating the words.