It Has a Name
A poem of contrasts and mortality
How do I have a twin and I hadn’t even passed
away yet —
this is what my cousin asked me. My niece looks just like me.
Acts just like me.
She is me.
News of a Glamorous Gossip host fighting for her
sanity after being cheated on, shat on
hunts my hours.
Where are her memories now. Will they float. Land
on a smaller version of herself?. She is not dead.
It’s just progressive, they say. It’s dementia.
It has a name.
Is it better that Death has a name?
The death of memory? Of temporal front lobe
mediocrity that’s now maligned. Death of marriage
Death of spirit.
I held my niece once, as she wailed because
of a needle to her thigh; my dad raised her
high one day, declared “She will live
long and be smart.”
Memories —
play like technicolor with some conversation
pieces missing, dangling in the peripheral backgrounds
like a dream I can’t catch.
Now, this poetic exercise was super hard. It took me a couple of days to write it. In Diane Lockward’s The Practicing Poet, the exercise wanted us to revise using the “top down” method while creating contrasts between a current event and our own lives. I hope I achieved it here. Thanks for reading!
