Song of Memory

by Ellen Collins

We have forgotten how to tie our shoes, how to button our sweaters, how to hold a fork. We have lost the ability to add a column of numbers, to trace a route on a map, to color inside of the lines, to sip through a straw. We no longer know the word for paper clip, toothbrush, Kleenex, pancake turner, eyelash, wrench, or tablecloth. We cannot laugh at your jokes. We cannot remember how to spread mustard on a hot dog, how to seal an envelope, how to tell time, how to light a candle, how to use toilet paper, how to walk without tripping.

We were Federal Reserve bankers, farmers plowing furrows for corn, mothers rocking feverish babies, chefs at four-star restaurants, and hash-slingers at diners. We sketched blueprints for houses and theme parks, pounded out the notes for symphonies and rock songs, handed out Kennedy Center programs and free car wash tickets. We marched silently over the bridge to Selma, picked lettuce and grapes in heat-baked California fields, smeared our fingers with late-night ink in newspaper offices, wore our smiling faces at the brass-handled doors of New York hotels, computed your taxes every April, diagnosed your diabetes and asthma and clogged arteries. We huddled in subway stations with all our possessions in broken down grocery carts, worked three jobs or no jobs, embezzled, invested, played the lottery, debated issues, signed petitions, shouted out the Jeopardy answers, shoveled sidewalks, cleaned carburetors, organized the PTA.

Good Measure

by Pamela Schmid

In the summer of ’76, my little sister and I were shipped off to Camp Rim Rock, set beside the leech-infested Capacon River in the woods of West Virginia. I joined the other ten- and eleven-year-olds in the Cherokee camp, a jumble of rickety cabins at the top of a steep hill, while Patti—at nine a lowly Shawnee—was stationed closer to the lodge.

I remember the overpowering outhouse smell and the way the berries in my strawberry shortcake bled into the tiny dollop of cream. I remember the gnat that flew into my ear, buzzing there for hours until it finally died. I remember horseback riding and camping and playing tetherball for the first times in my life. But what stands out most from that summer is the song my sister and I learned there, “Obalaba Koobalaba”—one of those nonsensical chants of youth that burns into your brain and never leaves.

Baptism

by Michele Bombardier

His hand a fist as he pulls the catheter
from his crotch to above his head,
an arc of movement and mustard yellow urine
dousing me, my clipboard and my intern name-tag,
his head lolls to one side, his eyes closed.
I pull up a chair, lower the bedrails.
He bats at my hand. When he finds it, he quiets,
his hand a vice on mine. We sit like this,
in his wet, a tableau, for maybe ten minutes
before I go to get the nurse.