“take my right arm/where it was blown off/and set it in your sleeve” –Meena Alexander
pass by the one wearing shoulders. threaten sleep by clinging eyes closed. i am curds, poached over rocky mountains. i am daniel, too distressed for a middle. i saw married and skinny. i ate october and not-quite 2am. if there is another, call me stone. place me near western waters in canada. even fingernails have a difficult time with closure: they keep extending until. mud casts a supporting role in this. and there is a walk-on cameo by analogous joints that used to bend inward. most of the time, these are poems. and so it is. some of the time, they are love letters to the ones I stutter against. there was that one time, it was a declaration of itch and bother. where is the carnage of your tongue after it windmilled beneath mine. just just just look past the mold and yellow lists spine’d on plastic shelf and remember that even in death, we are [all] just trying to catalogue the caskets build into our bodies.
Aimee Herman 
If love is the antithesis of selfishness, what are memories the antithesis of?
i love beginning this second part of my day with a question. Thank you for twisting my thoughts into a furrow. I think memories are like the clicks we hear on wrists. The opposite of time. Or the other side of what we call to mind when we think of “what ten o’clock looks/feels like.” But is love the antithesis of selfishness? Love can be deeply selfish. Selfish to a body. Selfish to the structure of bones. But none of this has to be a negative thing. Selfishness is awareness. As well are memories.
Memories are time that we earn. We do not sit and wait. Memories as recall happen at the most opportune moments (kairos). Even when it seems to be bad timing, it is not. Regardless of what society claims it does, we are not supposed to repress. Remember.
I’d argue that memories are also found like bits of bleached paper in pockets. And we (can) grow blind from translation, CV. Bad timing is relative, yes. But we are bodies wound up and wounded and we tick tick tick; the repression arrives like a cage because some things are not ripe yet. Some memories are too hard to dig out, to peel, to eat. When they begin to ooze…..that is when…that is when brains and tongues can begin to enter in.
Absolutely, but subconsciously we must earn the rights to our guts and fears. The right time like you say is sometimes bruised like a banana, but when the ripeness registers and overthrows our guts and fears, that is when we are ready to enter the battle field. Thanks for battling, AH.
beautifully articulated. Yes, I can smell that potassium. Inhale, inhale.