HOME (INITIAL FINDINGS)
KEY:
1. the apartment came with a table attached to the wall.
2. the center point of my mother’s body.
3. i sit in bed, clean laundry lotused around me.
4. brother sister and i in the same room together for hours, just being.
5. his sleep patterns, his weight, the smell of thin cotton against his back.
6. a photograph of a yellow t-shirt sends me flying back 12 years to the suitcase dad heaved into the trunk, the milk jug crawling across the pavement.
7. when logic jumped off the roof, my friends made a nest of the living room.
8. three days into orientation, i looked at sunlight on brick rooftops, this is where i live now.
9. a burnt hole, a pressed eyelid’s starburst, red to green.
10. i filled the room with my own smoke, spent the night in the bottom corner of the window.
11. three mattresses side by side on the floor, a pink quilt, a soft heap of body.
12. i never learned my grandmother’s name.
—from Rattle #49, Fall 2015
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Franny Choi: “After my grandfather died of Alzheimer’s last year, I found myself writing more about family and memory. I’ve always had a terrible memory and have often relied on poetry as a tool for remembering. This poem is part of an attempt to engage directly with the process of looking back through my memories and trying to locate myself in them.” (website)