Tag: memory

Muscle Memory

1 May 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Anne Bower

She’d told us the genetics,
smiled into the words
as if Alzheimer’s was just
some trip to the beach.

Now she can’t drive,
husband brings her to class,
where she’s
blank-faced at first,
repeats name of disease
that’s taking her mind.
Frowns as we start,
yet her body glides to tai chi.

A pause. She shakes her head,
not knowing what comes next.
A breath, shudder,
yet years of practice surge
her forward. She steps, turns,
gestures easy, smooth.
She’s swimming in a calm sea,
grins with delight.

Anne Bower lives in rural Vermont, teaching tai chi and training tai chi instructors. She has three chapbooks to her credit and poems published in The Raven’s Perch, Gemini Magazine, Cool Beans, Nine Cloud Journal, Plainsong, and many other journals and anthologies.

The Leaving Moment

9 May 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Tracey Ormerod

I don’t remember packing, but my things must have been on the truck: the plastic-yellow colander I still use every day, the one he cursed while poking the holes with a corkscrew to dislodge spaghetti starch; and the crock pot—just last week, it slow-stewed the roast.

I do remember what couldn’t go on the truck: the propane tank. Over thirty years later, the moving guy no longer has a face but I can still see his burly body hauling it over to where I stood and dropping it at my feet. The lawn muffled the thud. “It’s full … can’t go on the truck.”

He left it there and went back to lift off the truck ramp. He was ready to leave. I turned to my mother in a panic. “What do I do with it? Do I just leave it here?”

He softened and came back. “Here, you open it up, like this.”

He turned the valve. The tank whistled.

Researchers say we alter our memories every time we look.

Quantum particles are like that too. Scientists can’t watch them without changing them, so they’ll never know how they behave when no one is looking. Nonetheless, they can’t help themselves.

Maybe that’s why countries and cultures carve their collective memories deep into stone and story.

Families collect them too. They share ‘remember whens’ that hold their tales together, until there’s a rupture and the timeline becomes a shredded thread of itself.

In a review^[1] of the film, Women Talking, Eliza Smith reflects on her missing memory of leaving her first marriage:

“I may not be able to recall my own leaving moment … but I do remember the precarious, optimistic feeling of leaving one world for another that didn’t quite exist yet.”

She mentions a friend who can’t remember her leaving moment either. So, for the first time, I learn there’s at least two other women like me.

How many of us are out there? A collective without a memory.

I don’t remember why he didn’t get the tank, except maybe the barbecue had been a gift from my side of the family, like the bone china and crystal bowls.

I also don’t recall where my two-year-old was that day.

And then there’s the house keys. How did they get dropped off with the real estate lawyer? I’m not even sure how we sold our house; I don’t remember any sales agents or buyers.

So many details that would’ve been important at the time, while the only other thing I can remember is a song that played on the car radio: Wilson Phillips singing “Hold On, things can change. Things can go your way …”

We leave home. We get left—they say there’s fifty ways to leave a lover. Sometimes, we leave the country. There’s also the countless tiny leavings, like after a dinner date or a party.

We arrive. We leave. Over and over and over until, at last, we depart dearly.

I don’t remember why the mover left the tank with me, except maybe he was hungry and took a lunchbreak. It was full and emptying it would take time.

Even when gas weighs heavy in a tank, it comes out invisible, but I stood there and stared down at it like there was something to see while it hissed like a snake in a pressure cooker, making my leaving loud for the neighbours watching from behind their bay window sheers.

Silent together, we couldn’t help but watch as it grew quiet and the frost spread all over the tank, the kind that burns when you touch it.

^[1] Smith, Eliza. “The Most Satisfying Me Too Movie Yet.” The Cut, January 20, 2023. https://www.thecut.com/article/women-talking-me-too-movie.html.

Tracey Ormerod is a Canadian writer and photographer. After growing up in the wilds of the city, she now lives among the forests and farms of rural Ontario. At times an accountant, business analyst, website consultant, and classroom teacher, she is now enjoying a writing life. Read more at https://traceyormerod.com.

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Jukebox

3 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by C.T. Holte

Most nights, I am a jukebox.
Tunes play from the stash in my head—
doo-wop to Debussy,
Bach to Beach Boys—
chosen by a mysterious mechanism
and repeated as many times
as the system specifies:
no Next button,
no Mute switch,
no Off to let me sleep.

The selection varies:
last night, the top hit
was Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus,
reprise of a piece I had sung recently
at a choral workshop;
tonight, perhaps a favorite or two
from American Bandstand
or Casey Casem’s top forty countdown.

Music and memory are amazing gifts,
even at the price of sleep interrupted
by random hours of Deck the Halls
at any time of the year.

C. T. Holte grew up without color TV and played along creeks and in cornfields. He has been a teacher and editor, and now migrates between New Mexico and a tiny New Hampshire cabin. His poetry is found in Words, California Quarterly, Months to Years, Pensive, and elsewhere.

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Sparrows I Have Known

21 June 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Catherine Coundjeris

My first memory is of song–
song in sunlight rapturous and bright.
Elusive bodies hopping in branches
and on rooftops, lining wires
and chattering back and forth.

In Boston to my delight,
by old Ironsides, they
came to rest on my table.
Perching on the backs of chairs,
begging for morsels.

With my brother in Oxford,
we noticed their variety
marveled at their language
photographed them on walks.

Now in Frederick, outside Walmart,
they sit on baskets, flit
between cars, and angle
for scraps still curling along
the macadam.

It is April and I remember
our trek through back roads,
looking for hawks and eagles
with sparrows for company.

I have seen them
beat each other up
at bird feeders.
We have my brother’s old
feeder but we need
to buy a post for it.

They come anyway and
taste the seeds
on our fruit trees,
alighting on the wildflowers
on the hill behind our house.
My brother would have enjoyed it here.

A former elementary school teacher, Catherine Coundjeris has taught writing at Emerson College and ESL writing at Urban College in Boston. Her poetry is published in The Dawntreader, Visions with Voices, Nine Cloud Journal, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Bombfire, Paper Dragons and many more.

Meeting

25 April 2022 / Editor

Poetry by David Goad

There was a time
I took the train to see you in the outskirts of the city,
And from the gray
Disjointed sprawl of life,
You formed somewhere just beyond the line –
Past black and white
Nooks and crannies
Framed in trash along the tracks –
In the world’s singular course,
there comes the hammers, the ties,
The earth piercing nails
Laid by dead hands of men
Whose sweat formed the communion
Of your light
As you waited
Under the crooked streetlamp.

David Goad is an attorney who currently lives in Washington DC. He resides with his lovely partner and little puppy, Pennie. When not working, David enjoys writing poetry that touches on the nature of memory and the human experience in the modern world.

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But It Deepens

28 March 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Jeff Burt

Snowflakes swirled under two streetlights at the park like shooting stars against the night sky. A young woman lay prone on the cement walk. I first thought she was making angels in the snow, but with more inspection seemed more on the path to becoming an angel. She did not move. The bellows of her chest had stopped.

I felt for a pulse on her iridescent wrist, flesh a translucent paper exposing thin, visible veins from arms gone gaunt. I touched her berry-colored lips to close them, the unlit indigo of her iris like an old bruise, a plum after the sun has caressed and not yet ripened, of a lily when the color vanishes and the petals fall, the pale purple of candles of the church lit for repentance, the amethyst of meditation, the lilacs pressed in books to mark a place of interest lost in the shuffle of reading, dried lavender, as if Death had kissed her but was interrupted before all color had been taken.

Her rayon dress ran through my fingers, like mercury freed from containment and spilling on the pavement unable to be contained by the merest boundary, without bond, lake water slipping through my hands no matter how hard I tightened my fists, and I remembered my mother’s hands covered in cornstarch when I was a child, her laughter at watching the water beads form in her hands as she tried to wash them, the starch remaining in the crevices of her palms like snowflakes she said, that do not melt in the darkness underneath trees.

I called for help. Snow fell and kept on falling. I wanted the snow to fall like rain, anonymous, consistent, but each time I looked out saw chaos, swirls without pattern, each flake individually propelled. I covered the woman with my jacket.

She survived.

That night my father called. Cancer had taken my mother.

Though I am separated by years from that night, I still see the silhouettes brought by that snowfall, the variations of brilliant white, dirty white, and gray, and the stunning blackness of the park’s backdrop. I still see every variation of flake falling under the lamps, the wide, the slim, the lace-like, the cotton-like, the confetti, the crystal, the furred, the angular, and the oblique.

The snowflakes perpetuate like a background that never gets refreshed, snowflakes not feathery like eiderdown which sways back and forth like a pendulum lowering itself to earth, but drifting, white blossoms floating on the dark swells of quiet waterways, white funeral mums among black cloth, white petals of roses against the dress of dark evening, white hair of my mother with cancer drained of pigment, white doilies she treasured as gifts, the white of waves high capped and falling, white of waterfalls in spring, eidolons of snowflakes lingering in memory, eidolons that haunt me.

All images now resolve into one collage and crowd my consciousness. They become a single form flying at me on a conveyor of wind until I cannot perceive, not blinded, but that visible shape has been coalesced into a picture book fanned repeatedly with frames I cannot distinguish, surviving, dying, all one.

People tell me this will pass. But it deepens.

The mind filters and selects things we do not wish to come forward, and most often, the years have eroded memories, and they no longer hold us. Snow melts.

For me, it has never stopped snowing.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife. He has worked in electronics, healthcare, and mental health. He has contributed to Gold Man Review, Per Contra, and Consequence Magazine.

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Sawdust

22 March 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Terri Mullholland

The wooden owl her dad carved and painted for her when she was a child still sits on the fence. The once bright colours now so faded that from a distance, and without her glasses, it looks as if it might fly away at any moment.

Her dad was always making something from wood, things for around the house, coasters, a spice rack, a chess set. He even made her a Noah’s ark, complete with two of every imaginable animal. Every weekend, he’d be there in the shed, whittling away, carving, shaping, chiselling, sanding, bringing each piece of wood to life.

The door would be ajar, and she’d creep in, sit on the floor and watch him.

He was a quiet man, never one to chat or whistle or hum while he worked, and not one for small talk. But during those hours in the workroom, watching his hands craft and sculpt, she felt close to her dad. He spoke to her through those silences they inhabited together.

She’d sit at his feet and play with the wood shavings that lined the floor, beautiful paper-thin coils of wood. If she found a perfect spiral that seemed to go on forever, she’d put it in her pocket, take it up to her room to wonder at alone. She’d carry pieces in the pocket of her school cardigan, a talisman against the bullies.

Her fingers would worry the coil away to nothing. Then she’d have to go back to the shed for a new piece.

He stopped making things from wood long ago. When his hands became stiff and clumsy, when he had too many accidents, and her mother said enough.

Two young men came to dismantle the shed; his tools were packed up and sold. She was glad he never lived to see it all go.

She wishes she could still go back for one last perfect spiral, one last lucky charm.

Now, years later, every pocket is full only of sawdust.

Terri Mullholland (she/her) is a writer and researcher living in London, UK. Her flash fiction has appeared in Litro, Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Toasted Cheese, Full House, Severine, Tether’s End, The Liminal Review, and Analogies & Allegories Literary Magazine. When she is not writing she can be found curled up with a good book and a cat.

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summer season

21 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Erin Lorandos

you
pulled the folded
pocket knife from even
older denim
as you looked towards
the horizon of this life –
saying nothing

and now you open
the knife with one hand
deftly pushing the blade
out and away –
one thumb resting
against that sharp edge

for just a moment
my eyes are pulled to
your left hand –
that’s palming the red,
delicious apple

so fresh
the tree limb
still sways in protest

Originally from Wisconsin, Erin Lorandos is a librarian and writer living in Phoenix. Some of her recent poetry can be found in Drifting Sands, The Avocet, the 2021 Poetry Marathon Anthology, and in The Purposeful Mayonnaise.

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Some Evidence

20 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Jen Prince

There’s a little church in my hands—
supplicant fingers that petition the kitchen table, fracture,
find broken only the bones that matter.

Hound the relics of god’s own garbage that thrum under my skin, gentle and wicked,
blinkering as through a veil.

What I find I pull close, press in, tuck under my chin. Now
this is the dark-eyed child who takes after her mother.
This is the daughter who speaks softer.

Down the hall the dog is barking, marking the wail of a plane through wafer-thin walls—
there’s a certain pitch at which my brain just breaks.

My voracious father, a dog lover, has been known to lose his appetite from time to time.
Has been known to gorge instead on godly ferocity, the muscles in his jaw flickering
like the first light of the world.

I know you better than you know yourself, he said: when I met your mother,
I warned her I could yell.

In my own home moonlight passes over like a benign plague or stranger’s favor,
and an owl calls me alone from sleep.
The iron words lie hot on my tongue, drowned and hissing.

Jen Prince is a writer and editor based in Memphis, TN. Her poetic work centers on ideas of separation, memory, and myth. Her poem “Brittle Mirror” has been accepted for publication at the Scapegoat Review.