you say amnesia like it’s a bad thing

The edges of the hole in my memory are ruffled and soft,
curtains swinging in a September breeze
when you get a drink from the kitchen sink at midnight,
because the water from the bathroom has always tasted like blood.

I make a timeline of my childhood memories and it scatters
like the map of a wondrous country drawn in the first pages of a very long book
where animals talk and the mermaids are murderous and ships sail off the edge of the world:

I do not remember being seven. Or eight.
Or five.

My fragments, the potsherds of who I was before I became whoever I am,
do not form themselves back into their ceramic shape

and I am grateful.

For what has been lost is gone to me and what remains
(the wind through the trees outside – my room was on the corner and it rustled all night long)
is pleasant and worth keeping; the rest may go.

What remains is the figure of ash and bone and mud and potsherd –
the golem I made of myself and breathed life into.
I made my own words and none can take them from me.

There is a quiet in the dark and the hollow of my lacking,
and I will rest myself in it, for I am weary.

***

Originally from coastal New England, D. Pless now lives in rural Western Washington. Her previous work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Writer’s Foundry Review, Shift, and West Trade Review, among others. She was the winner of the 2021 Philadelphia Writers' Convention poetry contest and shortlisted for BMP Voices' 2021 National Poetry Month contest.