Poetry by A.Martine: This Is Not a Complicated Memory

This Is Not a Complicated Memory

Although she queries mercy everywhere,
she likes playing with fire, she knows 
that about herself. So when she asks 
— for a friend — what, exactly, is the 
definition of assault, she challenges 
every explanation offered her and emerges 
vindicated. See? For her (friend), it was 
much more grey zone, and it was ages ago, 
and he wasn’t a stranger, and what he did —
anyway. 
             Couldn’t be. 
Wasn’t it. 
             Moving on.

When she hears of people dying, she forgets 
to say sorry before she asks how it happened. 
Or in truth, the forgetting is intentional.
Why not spare a thought for the departed
before comforting the dispossessed? Another 
orphic form of mercy. To look ahead, and 
outward, when behind and closer to home —
anyway.

In her most vivid dream, a Lac Rose Lébou 
told her she was an island. But not in the 
“no man is” way, in the actual sense of the 
word, land button-dropped in middle of water, 
way. Smoothing the sea around her like her 
very own teal blanket, spying on the moon’s 
two-step above, until its count, too, loses her:
it’s no wonder she’s mixing her decades and 
her centuries. She thought she’d grow out of it 
along with the heights, but her inches are slow, 
and slow she stayed wanting. The rising setting 
sun carves grooves into the sky, and she sits 
swaying above her body and loathing all of it,
and all it could not help her fend off;
accosting, questioning, how it came to be that…
but anyway.