Six Week War
Tara Avery
Lives are novels, every detail included:
color of shirt, style of shoe, parting of your hair—
an inundation of stimuli, ingested and overlooked.
If life is a novel, memory is a poem:
heightened emotion, indecipherable imagery,
grasping for meaning in a metaphor.
Memory of a hand in my hand is rendered uncommonly significant,
even if, at the time, it was habitual, unpremeditated,
even if, in the novel, it happens on every other page.
This is how I remember you:
Not the end on my lips (repentant),
or the color of your sweater (yellow),
or even the scar gently curving like Mona Lisa’s smile (near your eyebrow).
You are the way you ducked your head to hide the shine in your eyes,
you are your arms holding on a moment too long, too tight,
you are the tremors racking your flesh, deep as days-old aftershocks.
You are the way you never looked at me again, not really,
though we pretended at friendship for years afterward,
suffering from Stockholm syndrome of the heart.