Some months feel like years, but I feel like I just had my annual physical when I open an email to schedule the next one, / I have early memories of a 45 from a 1959 girl group that I can’t place the name of, playing while I danced to the beat when I was three, / and of seeing carpeting ripped from our apartment floor just before we moved when I was four, not knowing when that carpeting was installed, / and of toys I played with when I was five, whatever happened to them, / and of time markers, / Halley’s Comet and solar eclipses, / the Voyager mission reaching Jupiter in ‘79, Saturn in ‘81, Uranus in ‘86, Neptune in ‘89, / in ’77, I was wondering where I would be in ‘89, / I’m in a future already lived, / piercing through the years of madness, 1968, 1984, 2001, / and my son graduates college next month, not long after I was driving him around in a car seat, tossing back stories I made up about this or that, / but now I’m sixty, living life in a bad novel and what might end up being a great movie, unable to see much beyond next month, looking back at yesterday as if it were weeks ago, / didn’t I just get a new furnace last year?

(Published in LIPS #50, Spring 2019)