I carry no pictures
Because I like to remember her in my own way.
Photographs cause me to be lazy,
relying on their paper for memories.
Paper can't tell my mind about the trail
of cigarette smoke
or all the bottles of perfume
of the color of her fingernails.

"Memories are all that matters," he says.

But what happens when I forget?
So I force myself to remember
The lipstick on the end of her
cigarettes
(100's, of course)
And scrambled eggs in the morning,
Salad for lunch, that she would let me make
And fried potatoes with dinner

Sweaters in the winter,
Gespacho in the summer,
ate it for every meal.

The time when I dropped a plate on the tile,
And she wasn't upset.

Her dark-complected skin
Exact opposite of my pale face.

The shiny, twisted metal on her slender fingers
That I now wear on mine.

And the little china tea-set.
When I was ten, we used it.
She said I could have it when she died
We took out a Magic Marker and printed my
name on the box in large letters.

And that was the first time I experienced
the double feeling of wanting the tea-set,
but not wanting her to die

Between now and then, I would rememberthe tea-set
Wondering if when the time came it would
still be there,
and I would know to claim is as mine.

I have the tea-set now
And her jewelry
And now I smoke 100's
(much to the dismay of my mother)

And when I jitterbug,
I remember her doing so in the kitchen.

So many things I could say,
Going on for pages.
My pen flying with a furious urgency to
write down the grains of memory before they
slip through my swiss cheese brain.

But I don't.
I simply cry
To keep myself from forgetting.