Antinarrative
Let’s mount a staircase
into memory, where the elevator is
always broken–
because it is summer
and the dormitory is officially closed,
shut against the city crows and pigeons,
the fat sparrows like bullies lining the pavement,
although people (we) continue to live here, unpermitted–
into memory’s eighth floor, memory’s close quarters.
It is our last night next to one another.
We talk as children talk
in bed until sleep overwhelms us,
catches our lips and reels us to the surface–
which is the opposite, maybe, of how you expect
sleep to be figured, sleep should be the depths
and waking the surface, but–
here on memory’s eighth floor I am pulled
toward sleep, a fishhook at the corners of my mouth,
which slows and stops while I’m still speaking.
People (we) continue living
in all kinds of circumstances,
including memory, memory’s stale air
layered with smells from the neighbor’s cooking–
which isn’t actually cooking but heating things
on a hotplate, strictly forbidden in the officially closed dormitory,
a hotplate made hotter, in the way of things, because it’s illicit–
and we sleep our last night in garlic breath
from the hallway, memory’s window
cracked open as far as institutional design allows,
the soundtrack a faint trace of traffic.
*
We enter memory’s eighth floor
on the stairs, but I leave alone, by bus,
with my headphones on,
familiar songs a thing to hold on to,
a walkman, discman, giant old iPod in hand–
not old on memory’s eighth floor, new, a gift
from the man I’ll return to,
a future smooth and satisfying, in its way,
as an iPod’s clean white plastic.
*
In the movies women cry
when their lovers leave them,
cry in the bar, the barn, the backseat of a car,
the airport, or standing at a window
overlooking a sparkling city.
But on memory’s eighth floor,
everything is backward
and I am crying because
I want to leave him and stay with you.
Some people (we) are unpermitted
as a dorm-room hotplate.
And I am here, and you are there,
and we are each an engine hum
on the edge of sleep,
an unwalkable street.
Kathy Goodkin is a writer, musician, and teacher. She is the author of Crybaby Bridge, winner of the Moon City Poetry Award (Moon City Press, 2019) and Sleep Paralysis (dancing girl press, 2017). Her poems and criticism have been published in Field, Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, and elsewhere; her recent scholarly writing has been published in Bishop-Lowell Studies. She is Assistant Professor of English at Bennett College in North Carolina. She lives in a house full of daughters and dogs.
