About the Column:

Poems of Our Climate is a weekly poetry column run by Sofia Baluyut ’23. The column was founded by Oliver Egger ’23 as a part of the Route 9 Literary Collective. Submit and read past issues of The Lavender at Route9.org. If you are interested in having your poem featured in this column, please email your work directly to sbaluyut@wesleyan.edu. 

 

my memory is mine (and i love her even when she lies / and she loves me so she lies)

it has been said that memory is your old 

television, fuzzy, color fading 

away and you must hit the side 

to get the image back, before you blink you

think other realities 

have slipped through, too

 

and so the memory of us 

i see through the yellow-stained

glass, the portrait is surrounded by a haze

but still i know it’s you here

my mind reconstructs you as we were 

 

a visual of my handiwork, 

a topography of curves and bumps 

i felt we were 

  

visceral always is my memory

my body aches today where it remembers the pain

my blood flows—a rise, a fall—in the same rhythm

as when we first happened

flowing this way only when 

i think of you and you think of me, too 

 

the process of becoming 

everyone, everything, every experience 

as i know it in my body 

 

i’ve heard that some say

memory is a kind of fiction 

a fable for truth

a lesson learned, a hope come true

 

what I ought to know 

because of what I don’t 

 

but still 

 

the remembrances recur:

the first kiss myth 

you ask me if it’s true and for you i say yes

all the first kisses, realfake, stored

in my mind: sep 12 2014 and/or 

sep 29 2014 and/or/and/or 

my mouth remembers every kiss as a new one

a pleasure of the lips, lingua franca, oral history  

 

but still

 

soon i will forget that you ever seeped through

for the care and delicacy required 

to love when i relive myself  

 

because my memory is my love

fluffing pillows, smoothing out wrinkles, retucking the sheets

 

my memory is my own sustained acts of attention,

the remaking of my bed

 

About the Poet: 

Genesis (Hennessy) Pimentel is a Dominican-American writer from Boston, MA. Haunted by words and constantly coming undone by the act of writing, she nevertheless pursues writing through creative and academic endeavors. Much more likely to be found writing fiction, obsessing over oral storytelling, and reading theory, she humbly presents this foray into poetry—a medium she does not often work with, but eyes jealously and longingly for how it seamlessly blends all of her favorite things.