Memory Box is about a relationship that passes over a desire for children, choosing instead to focus on holding memories, like deep secrets. I started this poem at Juan Morales’s workshop at the 2020 Jackson Hole Writers Conference, where we wrote about recent dreams. Shortly after, I traveled to the north end of the spit protecting Wilapa Bay; Dragonflies played in the electric seaside air, pausing and resting on the plants that were struggling (and succeeding) in their spring growth. Everywhere you could see suggestions of trails and infrastructure that had been removed from the landscape. There, I could develop the poem, imprinted with this world where dragonflies traversed the spaces emptied by what almost was. Their flight patterns of exploring, testing, and pausing inspired the dizzying— yet orderly— line layout.
I originally submitted this work to Querencia’s Quarterly Anthology, but they wrote back that it belonged in “Not Ghosts, but Spirits”. Collections are tiny collective miracles: fitting multiple authors together in a single piece of work, and reading it all together. They show me that we really have something more in common than we might experience if we write, and live, in our little bubbles. Editors orchestrate togetherness, the smoothing of our chaotic individualism. I love that someone heard the spooky palimpsest and grief in “Memory Box,” and chose to hang it in the right room. More often than not, experience of sacred care counteracts the fear of submission. So, brava.
MoonLit Fern 