To Erase a Memory
Call yourself to the stand commit perjury
as many times as needed to confuse the jury.
Unpin your memory from its room of maps.
Spackle the remaining hole then detonate the walls.
Push your memory through a cathedral’s latticework of shame
until it turns to beads.
Forage the substrate for the root to your memory
and pull it like a plug.
Drop your memory like egg-yolk flecked with blood
into milk & watch it
curl and vanish.
Your memory lies looped decades long.
Your palm a rhizome of your past.
Every person in the courtroom is you.
as many times as needed to confuse the jury.
Unpin your memory from its room of maps.
Spackle the remaining hole then detonate the walls.
Push your memory through a cathedral’s latticework of shame
until it turns to beads.
Forage the substrate for the root to your memory
and pull it like a plug.
Drop your memory like egg-yolk flecked with blood
into milk & watch it
curl and vanish.
Your memory lies looped decades long.
Your palm a rhizome of your past.
Every person in the courtroom is you.
Catherine Gander was born in Middlesex, England, has lived in several countries, and now resides in Ireland where she teaches at Maynooth University and runs a number of poetry initiatives, including the Maynooth Poetry and Poetics series (with Karl O’Hanlon) and Diversifying Irish Poetry: Poetry Critics of Colour in Ireland (DIP). Her recent words and art can be found in Ink, Sweat and Tears, Juniper, Abridged, Poetry Ireland Review, One Hand Clapping, Bad Lilies, The Madrigal, and The Irish Times.
Art: Katedrála (The Cathedral) by František Kupka