I am petrified stoney
of all the jammy things
I will come to forget,
their juice wrung dry
from my mind.

What if one dread day
I wake up wide and can’t
remember how my
Dad’s voice sounded
(like cannons, like rivers, like trees)
when he was
trying to tender-tell me
he loved me?

Or that loud unspoken
change in the living air
that I tasted quick and lively
when I opened the window this morning
and knew that airy Summer
has turned to earthy Autumn?

Or how the wind
burnt in clear flames
that night when I climbed sweaty
up the old hill from my house
and suddenly realized
I was no longer a child
and on fire?

key moments in my life,
simple sensations, brief instances,
and every day, they fade
a tiny bit,
dissemble, dissolve.
one dull day
what if I am
an old lady
dried and pressed flower
with nothing but ghosts of fleeting moments
inside my brain that
I can’t catch hold of?

maybe those forests
got it right, way back then
when they bathed in lava
to capture the moment then
forever,

petrified