As a newspaper reporter, I was taught to never rely
on eyewitness accounts. Jurors are told this too,
as they weigh a man’s guilt. Memory is slippery
like liquid silver, bonding to gold and amalgamating
into a whole new deal. Humans,
even the good ones, are untrustworthy.
Our cupboards, full of fairytales—old monsters
gathering dust, brittle golden eggshells,
a drunk witch running her mouth. And we hold
so tight to these vulgarities, insist on them.
My mother was incredulous when I explained
we never played together as kids.
How could I forget growing up on Boston Avenue,
those GI bungalows, how we’d steal
shopping carts and ride them down the street
while our fathers worked and our mothers cooked?
Since her illness, I’ve begun to think of memory
as a moonlighting lover, how it lies and leaves.
I’m obsessed as a Brontë heroine—long letters
written by candlelight, fever dreams of increasing
paranoia, cold air rustling at the torn pages
of my mind, and yet I fail to resist when he beckons
on violet nights, bearing gifts of jasmine and moonvine
which I crush in my fingers and hold to my nose.
I rise to another copper dawn.
I ask the sun to cradle me. I ask it to remember.