I forget my childhood.
it’s not that I do not know what happened.
what happened has been folded inside
my dreaming and my temporal lobe
a timeline of events I have had to retell
to doctors and new lovers
concerned friends
and I have had to repeat them
in my writing, had to rewrite and
rewrite and rewrite and re
write until my hands become stained
the blue ink from the chewed bic pen
bleeding into the dark
causing me to lose them
when the evening light
fades –
what I want to remember
is the way that it felt,
the shared silence
before bedtime, how our tears held suspended
most of all, I want to remember how
my tiny sister ate straight from the jam jar,
how her cheeks must have flushed
strawberry red
the initial embarrassment of being seen
before lifting into a grin
and how our laughter must have erupted
like the dollar store bubbles mother sometimes blew
as we danced on tiptoed feet in the living room.
I want to hold their iridescence
like this page holds what I’ve lost