Joy

Noun, oft. forgotten by grid-classed students between the ages of 5 and 25 years:

The simple hyper-pleasure of one’s eyes skiing a slide of words in sentences on pages of a book that does not devour, but sprinkles seeds of opal-apple trees that blossom in the gut of the mind branchia nucleating towards the ever-moving sun of a sandwich of paper and worm-paste that can be reinstated on a shelf, piled over with required readings and tiny Hungarian porcelain women, suffocated by alphabetic bookends, and still can be unended, still can spark a sun inside one’s mind, a reminder between the steel bars of literary criticism and the monkey wrenches of current squander that there is more to literacy than this; that letters can join hands and fins and crepuscules and together create something greater than the sum of a teacher’s paycheck, gridded, flat, dark, unchecked by what is sunlit.