Ways to not forget

  —ever since my mother said
  we forget so much and very often, and there are ways to not
  do that, I’ve been writing things down with a blue ball-point
  pen (font: god-knows-what; and size: anywhere between six-point-
  five and eighteen) on the hidden side of my palms, and
  then my arms, and on my belly, and then my shin, which is to say
  even below the knee. Words like how during the pandemic
  we listened to each-other
  in the world’s desolate hush. Like how at the hospital, you said to the doctor
  you had had trouble walking some distance.
  The words, so blue, so close to the bones, sometimes
  the letters end in red; to her photograph, I often
  say I need—I need to learn softness. I often stutter now, and she
  smiles. The idea is that we are not stone
  and don’t need etching, nor paper (although a blank
  page in need of improvement: in perpetuity, she
  says) nor sand or water. That we are so much more and
  different. But I’m also a journal, that if I stripped myself down here
  the bathroom mirror would notice the words
  on my body (although laterally inverted) and some dried blood
  and small healing scratches. Tomorrow, there will be other
  wounds, away from but also
  close to the ones made yesterday—