Memento
“We look at the world once in
childhood.
The rest is memory.” Louise Gluck
In my first house of cut-up
puzzles
Mother disappears behind
jumbled
heights, walls, gravity windowpanes—
a domain of no lullabies
but instead, pauses.
In the upstairs room
under elms
stars pelt the glass.
Hunger returns. Under my
chin
white ruffles loop
endlessly.
I remember to this day
the curved bassinet,
dusty pink,
how I lived within its
wicker.
Later she stored it on
the back porch
where even now, generations
later,
it calls me to return.
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