At the Mercy of my Own Forgetting Published in the May 2019 issue of The Write Launch Literary Magazine poetry
Declares the forgetting man under the florescent lights his face shadowless in a shadowed world
that he knows where it is once and for all. His Mountain Dew overflows all down the cupboards below
the soda station a fountain of oblivious distress. He lays ghosts at his feet who mumble and beg for permanent rest.
“Don’t forget a tasty treat” he expels and he waves toward me and a rack of Funyuns his Butterfly tattooed arm
branding me a forgetter too. I am stunned that I have neglected to anticipate Butterflies all this time and that her voice is more than a bunch
of tiny oxide particles embedded on a long strand of polyester.
“Don’t shift things about” the forgetting man insists but I did this very thing last year when we moved and until this Butterfly moment I thought that I had vanished her forever.
Her Wisconsin ‘yahs”, her shit the bed comments, her voice. Declares the forgetting man under the florescent lights
his face shadowless in a shadowed world that he knows where it is once and for all. More Mountain Dew surrenders itself
at his feet in pools of ice. I abandon his isle. The ghosts he lays at his feet scream at me,
“Don’t forget a tasty snack!” A smile claims my lips as he whoops his warning, “Don’t shift things about!”
I know I’ll find her tucked away in the Butterfly box at the back of my nightstand drawer wedged next
to the dream in which she insisted that I would be okay as long as I don’t search for things unbearably gone
or waste away at the mercy of my own forgetting.
Written during an incident at the Circle K in which I remembered where I had stored the cassette tape of me interviewing my Nana for a family history project just weeks before she died in a car accident.