In the Memory Wing
She isn’t scared until she sees
the other residents, people
worse than she is, women and men
who can’t feed themselves, who don’t
know where they are. They are the future.
A woman in the dining room
grabs my mother’s arm and pleads
I’m afraid, I’m afraid.
Still, she takes her meals there
rather than in her room because
she’s forgotten which end of the fork
to hold, and she wants to be able
to walk away from the mess she makes.
She’s sad when she calls me, asking why
this thing I’ve got has happened to her.
It’s not your fault, I tell her. Who knows?
Maybe genetics. When I was a kid,
someone told me that if you could see
the moon in the daytime, that meant that you
were crazy. I worried over my madness
until my mother tsked and told me
it wasn’t true. She pointed up
to the white omen, round as a bubble
of thought, in the blue morning sky.
Look, she said, I can see it too.
the other residents, people
worse than she is, women and men
who can’t feed themselves, who don’t
know where they are. They are the future.
A woman in the dining room
grabs my mother’s arm and pleads
I’m afraid, I’m afraid.
Still, she takes her meals there
rather than in her room because
she’s forgotten which end of the fork
to hold, and she wants to be able
to walk away from the mess she makes.
She’s sad when she calls me, asking why
this thing I’ve got has happened to her.
It’s not your fault, I tell her. Who knows?
Maybe genetics. When I was a kid,
someone told me that if you could see
the moon in the daytime, that meant that you
were crazy. I worried over my madness
until my mother tsked and told me
it wasn’t true. She pointed up
to the white omen, round as a bubble
of thought, in the blue morning sky.
Look, she said, I can see it too.
Juliana Gray's third poetry collection, Honeymoon Palsy, was published by Measure Press in 2017. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from River Heron Review, Fatal Flaw, Thimble Lit, and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.
Art: Yuno Shiota, 『薄い』 Usui Pale Light, 185 cm × 185 cm, oil and oil pastel on paper, 2.19.2022