“water remembers,”
you say, and so as soon
as I leap from the puddle
on the sidewalk,
I freeze. maybe if water
remembers dearly then
frost keeps nostalgia
close between air,
letting it drip slowly
in smiles and skids on the
pavement; remembrance
leaving its body, slipping
down metal slopes into cracks
down into dirt, up
through roots; until its
memories give a life
unspoken, untouched.

the day I thawed was
the day you held me. your
skin on mine, my words and
thoughts and remembrances,
details i held between air let
into leaves, dripped from blue
to gray to brown—
there are gunshots in the
distance and they remind me
of how i killed you, how
you killed me, not in the
sense that you shot me or i shot you
but in the sense that it
reminds me of
death.
you took my soul when
you grabbed it until it
was forced to escape from
between your knuckles:
rolling down like tears,
like rain, like sorrow in
the hundreds so many
that none of it is remembered anymore—
and mother said,

“water remembers,”

but all I recall is squeezing until
I drowned when I had just
learnt to freeze.