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—