Mummy
by Summer LoPriore
I will fold my life into parchment paper, save it for later,
crease into it slim caverns like the time
Chris knew which painting was mine
in the red barn, losing its legs and arms, among all the others.
I will know him in folds, which is to say double thicknesses
with emptiness in the middle aisle, which is to say memory:
some clouded pocket of the loss and the loss of him,
he lives six oceans away.
I will fold in the time we found a lake in the woods,
believing that we discovered something,
and I will crease the belief that we could into a pocket,
perhaps four times for all its heft, fill it with cold water—
a microcosmic ocean, a body I have command of.
I will make room for all the times he read Mary Oliver in the sun,
slip “Dogfish” into the water, watch it float on its back,
not like a dead man but like a little kid,
breathing and breathing like only poems can breathe,
keep a corner for blonde hair dye, and a poem I have yet to write,
and something like him, like novelty, or like living
will sit before me, wrapped like death.