| Poetry Maid Poet: Stacie Primeaux - thoughts and memories are linked together like long distance relationships
- the way your mother’s smile is related to your daughter’s, or like the bedroom to the dining room on a spider’s web
- and they hold and let go of hands
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- sometimes without consent
- sometimes unnoticed, doors are closed to rooms without consciousness
- appliances lose circuit, lights flicker out, and years later your 5th grade teacher’s name is unredeemable when called to mind,
- entire movies lose their plots
- or past holidays conceal themselves behind a shroud of years
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- but sometimes,
- and usually with some sort of jolt of the senses a No Vacancy sign flickers back on
- and life reenters the room you forgot
- a radio from the attic when plugged back in bursts out music from beneath it’s shell full of memories
- music that had always been there
- celebrating within
- by simply smelling oranges you could be catapulted back to a restaurant where the family was last together
- you cut your foot in the kitchen and are suddenly recalling hopping across hot black asphalt through the parking lot near the beach
- recollections are tricks and the mind is a magician
- pulling an infinite length of colored cloth from such a small place
- hiding one thing as a distraction for unveiling another
- taking one belief and with smoke and mirrors giving another
- and I wonder what will come back to me
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- I polish my kitchen table soothingly circularly until my silhouette glows and I childishly wish (aren’t we always childishly wishing?) to clean my head out as conveniently as I clean my home
- I would start with the clutter
- And take out the trash of those irritating horrible catch songs and radio commercial jingles that send my eyes rolling with images that neither taught nor entertained me
- Things that are useless when I’m trying to pay attention and focus
- Things that come uninvited, unannounced like an presumptuous visitor
- So that while I’m struggling to remember where I filed last year’s tax return, my hotdog has a first name it’s o s c a r
- And down the road while running a red light I dial 459-2222 and get a mister Gatti’s pizza delivered
- What is that shit?
- I need to take the trash out
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- to spring clean my thoughts
- sanitize the pictures I saw on the news of Jean Benet,
- feed worry through the shredder
- If I could send off in the mail the face of my ex boyfriend that keeps resonating and haunting the voice of a new lover
- If I could shove envy and jealousy down the food compactor
- Or the summers I worked to buy a pair of designer jeans
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- But what would you keep?
- Complements they’ve given you
- Fantasy and accomplishment
- Would you keep all of your suffering in order to retain your wisdom, and
- polish your hardships as trophies and symbols of your lesson’s journeys?
- Would you keep your fears in order to protect yourself?
- Would you rid yourself of curiosity if it’s always getting you into trouble
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- Would you keep the fear that was conceived from human hatred, the racist propaganda your Grandpa taught you?
- Would you keep the doubts and frustrations about your purpose, the guilt of disobeying a wrathful God?
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- Would you memorize every love letter that sailed your way?
- Keep all the best dreams at arms length
- If you could maintain your mind, clean it, adjust the temperature, decorate it, scrub it
- Put every emotion in its place and always accessible when needed
- Make it represent you
- And not betray you with itching worries
- Leave you with inexplicable tears
- Chain you to convention, fashion, possession
- What pictures would line your hallways
- What altars would be erected aglow with candles
- What food would embellish your table and nurture you
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- How would you keep your home
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