CW: none.
As someone who has had many family members lose their memory to disease, I wanted to write a poem where there isn’t exactly hope, but at least autonomy in memory loss—that instead of walking down a dimming path where you eventually lose your way home, it could be more like an act of burning your own memories to light the way to a different future.
Everywhere I go I start fires
Summer fronds and rusted bikes
low-hanging nests like the tongues of ancient trees
all of it burns the same.
Let’s walk to the woods in your stories
the one where no one ever wants to leave
and the figs are as big as mangoes.
We’ll dig up the melancholy in the words
you buried under a tree long ago, how it nurtured that tree
and gave life to strange fruit.
We don’t need that city
of stone people, no one would blame you
if you just gave up, gave in
let me turn you into a monster.
Just rake your hands over the embers
on my back, my fires will show you
how there is always another way home
if you are willing to burn everything down
to get there.
