Bookmark

Yesterday
I found the bookmark
you had gifted me five years ago.

It lay in a paperback
between pages 8 and 9.

The cover hadn’t lost its gloss,
and not a single page had creases.

Odd, considering most of my books
end up with dog-eared pages.
Some have been read so long,
they always stay open
no matter how much I slam them closed.

But this one looked untouched.

I wonder how I had read the first chapter.
Maybe I slept my way through it.

The Dirty Thirty, Poem 11