Forever-Forgetting
Posted by Alysia Harris | Filed under Poetry, Print
Is crumpled up inside your unforgiving hand-every poem you swallowed
every girl you’ve fisted and forgotten, every fetus you’ve fathered.
I won’t make noise when you unfold me.
The space between my shoulder blades
pinch it, spit your gum out there. so these memories stick behind.
A dumpster for your yearnings and your years
Dislocated into a past too big for small talk.
Must be divvied up and divorced. Knees go to you. You use them to pray.
Hips too narrow for things to come. I’ll keep
the lips and your calluses. Don’t ask why.
Split the wish guarded by a dandelion’s army. Everything else give to the wind
including the hope we prayed shoulder to shoulder in a mosque of frightened ribs.
Single file bones like a wet pack of cigarettes
shivering impatient unable to spark.
Won’t use you as a match.
Won’t plead with fate to get you back.
Let tire treads speak the friction and speed.
Let the distance that’s always been be the space I need
I’m done crossing lines, hunting future.
You, take this. Bury it in a ghost
and send it haunting.
Your hands smell worn in
but soon I’ll forget; time don’t wait.
I’m riding its knuckle into the jawline of tomorrow.
(Its face looks nothing like you.)
