Speak, Memory
(Vladimir Nabokov)
Find a carpet, find the cave, core a rock out with a spoon of broken
fire and cut yourself a new tongue to talk with. Wait inside the rock.
Speak, memory. I was fifteen, and a rogue, fifty, a meter maid, nine
and I was new here, passing out snow globes to various classmates
to honor the nickel they’d one day serve in the clink. Once, I bought
fake gin from a Gibson Girl who stacked her hair high like a thought,
or a steel piñata. I lived cage-free as her mirage, and was, it seems,
equivocal. I remember the inserts that were printed for the grocery
store. How they floated, glazed, like feathers out of the newspaper
and settled by our feet on the floor. On each of them a photograph
of my smiling dad holding a burp gun and a giant can of corn. Mom
blamed the French, and the French blamed Mossad. Me, I blamed
them all. I had a dream I was an aching tooth in Benny Goodman’s
mouth. Thoughts widen in the fire as I found it and I remember why
I cried. I remember the shadows flouncing on the walls of the cave
and the memory of all the emptiness between. Heavy tears sagged
at the old horseradish mines and the mortuary, absent the corpses.
I was in the fire. I was thirty-eight and in a teacup at the Fair, palms
weeping. Speak, memory. The winds, badass, and the south, afire.
I picked up my baby teeth and ran for the hills, I was ten months old,
it was tricky, I flagged a taxi down with my binky and burbled follow
that breast! We were in an alleyway, that was a mountain top, that
was a field of corn and a field of fathers, the idea being to leap onto
the first back that looked like it was ours, speak, memory, and find
me the one of me that knows, or knew, that had, even, the skeleton
of a plan, a theory in search of a solitary fact or lines scratched into
the earth with a switch, and in the dirt, in clumsy block letters, one
word I could learn how to speak: MOTEL, EXIT, HIGHWAY, or HOME.
Jeffrey Little has five chapbooks permanently on view at Mudlark, as well as several books you can actually hold in your hands. These include The Hotel Sterno, The Book of Arcana, (Spout Press, both), and Five and Dime (Rank Stranger Press). He is the father of two, the husband of one, and has two happy rescue cats tear-assing about the house like a pair of furry dervishes. He is a 2001 Established Professional Poetry Fellow from the State of Delaware.
