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A boy in my class asked me my favorite film and was disappointed when he heard I found Fight Club exhausting to sit through, that I preferred the animated films I watched on grainy television screens as a child. Film is the closest thing I have of many memories. My mother sits with me outside, placing cards in front of me with shapes printed on their fronts. I blank on the patterns once the cards have been flipped. I blank on her face as she turns away. Memory is a moldable thing, as is a poem. Forgive me, I’ve paused to reformat. Forgive me, I’ve paused to catch my breath. Forgive me, I’ve paused to collect myself, to wipe the tears from my eyes as I think about Princess Anastasia. They found her beside her brother, lonely bones all but forgotten. Her signature underlined three times, her body shot or stabbed or clubbed and then burned. Forgive me, I’ve paused to collect myself. An early winter fog has rolled in across Amherst as the air struggles to pick between sweltering heat and bitter cold. Snow fell outside my window last night, I saw it in the streetlamps. An artificial ray of sun. I don’t think anyone in their right mind prefers this weather to the summer, not in Amherst. I wonder how November was in 1917. A Russian-made missile hit Poland today resulting in two casualties. NATO and Poland have said it is likely an accident, but I don’t understand politics enough to know how the taking of a human life can be ruled an accident. I project morals and ideas onto a young girl born in the 1900s who died in a civil war. She has had enough people telling her story for her, and yet there is so much she never got to say. Note: is it better to let the memory of someone go or to live on in their memory? Can you live on in the memory of someone you never met? Can you live on in the memory of someone gone before your mother’s mother was born? I find her in the chipped red of my nail polish, the fat on my stomach, my bitten lips, the Massachusetts cold. I am standing at the train station in a crowd of faces, and I swear I see her out of the corner of my eye. I turn and she is gone.
12/12/2022