… the words for what I ate last night
as dinner progressed and friends probed
why I didn’t call when the stove top flamed
and the sump pump failed. I couldn’t bring myself
to explain their numbers frozen in a cell
resting on an ice cube tray.

And here’s more perplexity:
My long-term storage space overflows
with grade-school shame, teenage taunts,
resentments, blame tucked behind photographs
of my first love and snips of poems, hymns,
and prayers. As they escape, I confuse
the where and when of everything.

Yet there’s relief on mornings
when my coffee almost tastes the way it should
and the neighbor’s grey-striped cat shows up
to see if I’m still here. She doesn’t seem
to mind I can’t recall last night’s Good Wife
or make a dozen empty trips from room to room.
I offer her a nod and whisper words only
she can hear. Something about a poem
I wrote and can’t find anywhere.

(Previously published in The Galway Review.)

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Carolyn Martin is blissfully retired in Clackamas, Oregon, where she gardens, writes, and plays. Her poems have appeared in journals throughout the US and UK, and her second collection, The Way a Woman Knows, was released in 2015 (www.thewayawomanknows). Since the only poem she wrote in high school was red-penciled “extremely maudlin,” she is amazed she has continued to write.

Photo credit: Terri Malone