I thrum along the walls, looking for the light switch.

The tenants aren’t paying the rent.

The stoplights blink

wild, senseless patterns. The edges are frizzing;

the center, forgotten.

Someone is drumming off-rhythm.

The headstones have no markings.

It’s like that.

Or this. I’m trying to double-dutch but miss every jump.

The gears turn too slowly for the car to start.

I’m a hutch that holds too much. Or nothing.

A gully stuffed with old refrigerators.

Grit on a gusty day. The gurgle of a clogged drain.

The sludgy bottom of old coffee cups.

I’m humid and moody. I’ve lost momentum.

The old gumption has turned grumpy.

I’ve forgotten my speech in front of the auditorium.

The amygdala is overwrought and exhausted.

Muggy and pudgy, dumpy and rangy.

A jiggly flan. A pale pudding. A mangy dog.

The gaudy necklace has lost its gems.

The buzz-hum drowns the sweet and subtle

music. A muddy mouse hobbles along

slowing synapses. Myopic, we squint

at blurred trees. It's like that.

I want my brain to be a clean afternoon,

but no one water-skis on this murky pond.

No one sits on a beach chair

in this gusty cove. I want to second-guess

everything I’ve ever known

but can’t hold a thought long enough.

I’m drowning in dreams.

Mostly I’m ashamed,

but sometimes relieved to be relieved

of so much thinking.

I’ve forgotten to worry. Or I’m only worry.

I can’t remember which.

I fear you’re asking for that thing only I can give

but I can’t hear you through the mumbling.

I’ve forgotten desire.

I can’t find the doorknob.

But midday, head on a pillow, I hear—

under the couch, the wooden floor,

concrete, the rooty-worm layer,

the clay and the boulders

—that beating heart bedrock,

homefull and nameless,

that’s been with us forever.

It’s like that, too.

As I child, I was confused that I remembered my tail (where would it go in my pants

and how would I sit?) until I learned we all had one once, 25 million years ago.

I remember the shock of raw air when I was born and my mother’s sadness.

I remember tin toys from the 1940s.

I think my husband remembers the feel of armor against his shoulder, dough under the heel of his

hand, the joy of thieving. Being a girl.

I wanted my cells to remember the Ireland, land of my ancestors. They did not. Impossible

memories cannot be planned.

I remember the twitch of my feathered wing tip to change flight speed and direction.

My nephew, when he was three, remembered his “other mother.” Her name was Lolly, he said,

and she’d he’d been shot.

I remember drowning. I remember hunger. I don’t remember breathing under water.

I no longer remember what I swore I’d never forget: how to macrame, the string patterns

of cat’s cradle, anything from calculus, most sign language, all my French.

If time and space creases and unfurls like the origami I no longer remember how to fold,

please bury my jukebox full of advertising jingles.

Please release my black cat I had when I was ten. Let me feel her ribs under her thin skin.

Let her nose touch my nose again across these folded dimensions.