Memories on Your Birthday

Artefacts of your life: Duke, Moscow, the A. T,

the Naval Academy, what came before Rick,

Russian, Arabic; the longing for what you spoke,

saw, and never shared. The short-fibered feeling

of your prayer rug under my quietly questing fingers,

sliding, pausing, stopping, looking up, moon-faced, at

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

you. How religion and the sanctity of a soul are traded

for a moment’s relief; how turkey bacon can make a family

weep, smoke wandering up to touch too-high ceilings; how

twenty-seven and thirty-two are numbers confused & discarded

in the miasma of my memory—of him—of you. Motherhood

is lost on me the same way half-learned prayers in languages

foreign slip the mind like fingers of water on waxed windows,

the same way I conflate the images of three houses and thirteen years,

no different from the conflicting stories your daughters and I tell—

It’s the same feeling as when you left for Cairo like a sparrow in the night

and returned with a ring on your finger and the devil in your suitcase.