Try Attaching Sensation to the Figure in Memory

“Try being a figure in memory”
~Carmen Giménez Smith, “Photo of a Girl on a Beach”

Try figuring out whether memory
hibernates in the cave at the end of the beach
or in the hovel where a family prays over bread,
or the mansion surrounded by gardens & lanterns
that shine through night’s shadows hovering at dusk.
Then try to slake your way through density
into the soft call touching you now, luring you
with surface ease – kisses
barely grazing your lips, caresses on layers
of time. Try being that figure who lays herself
across desire, or the one before who waits
for desire to arrive. Or the one prior, she
who hears the word desire for the first time
and uses it to attach stars to her body;

and then try to remember what it feels like
the first time she falls – 

***

Karen Neuberg’s chapbook, “Detailed Still”, was published by Poets Wear Prada Press in 2009. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Memoir (and), decomP, Rose & Thorn, and The Same, among others. She’s an associate editor for Inertia Magazine and for First Literary Review-East.

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