in the globes

Four years ago, on the eve of the election, I was cutting snowflakes out of book pages for holiday decorations for Powell's City of Books. Yesterday on the eve of another, I did something similar, although decidedly more three-dimensional. The globes were made by cutting circles out of damaged books, gathering them in stacks of twelve and sewing down the middle. My job as a helpmate yesterday was to unfold them to get ready for our resident artist to hang them in holiday book art installations.

On impulse I jotted down a list of the random bits of book pages I unfolded...

A text called Civil Wartimes Illustrated.

Diagrams of molecules:

Polytetrafluoroethylene.
Risperidone.
Polysorbate.

Photo with caption: "Coretta Scott King mourns her husband."

Pink pages illustrated with drawings of the different stages of a fetus.

Map of the country.

Map of the world.

Medical sketch illustrating the woman's reproductive system.

Dictionary pages full of words:

Profligate.
Gainsay.
Imbroglio.