Memory

My grandmother didn’t remember me at the end.
She looked at me and said
“Jo! Why aren’t you at school?”
Jo is my mom.
I was six years old
When she left

it was without a memory of me.
But I remember.
I remember sitting on her lap as she painfully
combed the knots from my bird nest-hair,
I remember visiting her musty apartment
Old stuffed animals and chipped china dolls
littering her dining room chairs.
I remember the doll she gave me the last time i saw her,
Raggedy Ann with her faded blue dress, her yarn hair fraying.
And I remember when my mother said she was afraid.
Afraid that at the end, she would not remember either.

Introvert's Dilemma

I am tired of living
in an extroverts world
where silence is unforgiving
and emotions unfurled.
Where books are left on cases
their spines never cracked.
No one sits around fireplaces
words are never abstract.
I want to return to my books
of knights, squires and queens
lay down by a brook
fall into my dreams.
But change is never seen
on the young morning’s breeze.