Laura Wang

Elegy for the Kahala Mall Barnes & Noble
 
Some scorned your birth in strip mall-blighted streets
and tutted at your gaping double doors;
you were Goliath, pride of philistines,
waving your fist at the mom-and-pop stores

you’d quickly suffocate. Our little shops
around the corners where we used to play,
thumbing pop-up pages, child-bodies propped 
against the plywood shelves, faded away

while you gulped steady streams of customers
wooed by your lattes, stuffed chairs, ambient jazz;
those undisposed to liking literature
could curl up with Self magazine, or have

a long look at your penguin paperweights,
your leather journals seldom written in.
But then a new millennium brought new ways
of trafficking, and put you in a spin,

and now your turn has come: your boxy brows
are garlanded with deepening discount signs;
you eke your rent by hawking coffee grounds 
to harried parents. In some people’s eyes,

perhaps, you had it coming, and your close
is justice for promoting celeb hacks;
but I will mourn the stripping of your rows,
the passing of your grey-eared paperbacks,

for in the shrines we built to other goods
you made a space, however flawed, for words.

Laura Wang is a high school English teacher in Honolulu, Hawaii, the city where she grew up. Some of her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Christian Century, The Windhover, and Bamboo Ridge. Originally trained as a medievalist, she has also published scholarship on Chaucer and on the fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson.