Pecha Kucha of uncategorized memories
by Scarlett Peterson
[effort]
In the wake of loss, I come to be. New
child to replace the children that could not
survive.
[daughter]
What can I say about this? The gold necklace,
my names: Southern Belle and Cigar, the pink
I must have worn.
[red-head]
My first curls, same auburn as my mother’s:
a toy telephone, my toothlessness,
the denim and cross-stitch.
[fire]
I remember the roll of my body down the hill,
not the embers against my skin. The fire nearly
out and I, the tumbling extinguant.
[reptile]
The infant gator in my arms, electric-taped mouth,
four clawing feet, the flash of the camera before tossing
a bag-full of marshmallows down to its mother.
[spring]
My plucking the snowdrops and daffodils, insistent
the bouquets would survive. Then the fading petals,
orange going grey on the mantle.
[bubbles]
My child-hands guiding pen, marker, crayon
over fresh green paint, drawing the imaginary
friend I’d been told to have.
[girl]
The stupid pinks I embraced, the many glossy
covers I wore down, noting the someday, the
facade.
[breast]
The white domes of fabric, foam strapped
to my chest, the finally, the milk-chugging
I thought might help them grow.
[summer]
Kinking the hose before releasing the sprinklers
in the middle of a bloom-sick flowerbed, the wet
crest of my skin in the sun.
[athlete]
The red soccer ball, kicked dizzy in the front yard,
how I never knew what to do with it, just kick
and follow, kick and follow.
[girlfriend]
How I clung to the strange boy at private school,
how we sucked the nectar off honeysuckle stamen
along the hedgeline.
[reader]
All of those hours turning pages, stories I can’t recall
about cherry lifesavers, vampires lauding bodies like
mine, everyone living in the end.
[sister]
The little oval of her, how I hand-stitched a blanket blue
and dappled with cartoon characters, her early arrival,
her brown eyes.
[student]
In the cinder-block halls, a hug for any body turned my way,
an open lap for the lesbian in chemistry, her shaggy-laugh,
the bobbing lilt of it.
[fall]
How we packed the car as full as we could, two boxes
of shoes left behind, the pair of steep sandals I replaced
them with.
[cyst]
The rupture of it, the crying-pain of a collapsing star
in the ovary. White-hot and sinister, a reminder, an
origin-story.
[airplane]
The thud-clap popping of my ears at takeoff, the frosted
windows above the ocean, then the landing, the hit-skid
arrival.
[woman]
How I painted my eyes greener for the wedding, walked
cobblestones in a town I used to home-call,
the absence I surrender.
[excess]
The flaying of me under the lights, markered incision
points cut and reshaped. How I woke up lighter, less
of something, whole.