REMEMBERED

by
Karl Sherlock

how much of you is               mislaid, hardly knowing

what you’ve forgotten?                   a provincial train

murmurs beside                           a station’s platform,

& its doors carry &                    swallow your journey

like an apricot you picked                     absentminded

from a bag while                          in lazy conversation

with your lonesome.                            what were you

& you                                     cogitating anyway? fruit,

was it? that electric                                  stench rising

from railway ties?                               no, it was about

your own memory,                            how it sweetens

on sleepy afternoons,                          until you crave

the harp & pitch of                             your own voice,

not this aging croak,                      but as it was when

you were nine, begging                      to be lifted into

a plum tree, to flicker inside              its leafy chatter

as if, to all those branches,                          you’d only

just occurred, only now                           just ripened.

Karl Sherlock is a two-time Best of the Net finalist whose writing appears or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as Bacopa Literary Review, Broken Lens, Cathexis Northwest, Neologism, New Feathers, Stoneboat, West Trade Review, and others. His forthcoming poetry chapbook, A Longer Word Than Sorrow (River Paw Press), explores ecopoetics and personal themes of queerness, disability, and loss. Holding advanced degrees in writing from University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and University of California, Irvine, Karl is a professor of English and Creative Writing at San Diego’s Grossmont College. He lives in El Cajon, California, with his husband, Max, and their now thirty-year-old Poicephalus parrot, Bubo.