I don’t remember who owned the shabby cabin,
or how we knew it squatted unoccupied
across the state line, an hour’s drive with a case
of cheap beer and a few guitars. Nor do I recall
how many we were, though I can still feel the us
of us spilling from beat-up cars to settle mostly
on the floor, as if a gust had blown a clutch
of ragged birds inside.
It was summer, green pulsing in the trees,
and I was tipsy by the time it began to drizzle.
I don’t remember why I slipped through
the screen door, or how I got myself to the edge
of a pond, where a fallen tree lay stripped of bark
by weather and time. Up I climbed, to perch
like a wobbly bird on that resting nakedness,
a still point in the spinning forest.
I had survived by blending in, disappearing,
by not being the kind to sing out loud, outside.
But that day I had no mother, no father,
no backstory written on ribboned roads
by moving vans. What I had was knowing
nothing stays, or needs to, or should—
not even the knowing, that thing I would forget
and forget and forget. I sang that day.
I don’t remember the song.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2.
Brett Warren is a long-time editor and the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Cape Cod Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Hole in the Head Review, ONE ART, and other literary publications. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she lives in a house surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway.
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