Complete the
cloud of unknowing with the cloud of forgetting. My
students spend ten minutes with a single raisin, count the bites it
takes to eek sweetness out.
My grandmother's skin. A brain. 24 folds and 17 creases. Biography of
an ex-grape.
I am my raisin's keeper. Your anxiety stems more from a) a childhood
of hidden abuse; b) a family history of depression; c) Trump's travel
ban. Not to speak his name is
only an alternative forgetting. JUDEN VERBOTEN scrawled
on a Kaimana bench. NO BLACKS
on boarded-up windows in
Hilo. Is hate then memory's
substance? Throw gas on it, and a lit match. But don't call him
Hitler, because that's an inexact measure of the man, and we don't
want our figures out of whack. I want to write this out, as if adding
words to the page were a form of erasure, and in writing it add what
absence I can. Our first lady stood up their first lady. That's a sin
I can handle. We wrote Dada
poems with two speakers and a singer. Laughed,
and thought ourselves free of it.
--10
February 2017
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