Your Photo Stream is full. You must delete.
Last night, as my husband and the old
dog snored companionably, I walked
the floors, looking in on children no longer
asleep in their beds. Ghost voices
murmured, as I opened and closed doors.
I heard my son’s hand pawing through
boxes of Lego, feeling for the right piece
to complete an aircraft carrier; the clatter
punctuated by my daughter’s little voice,
as she made her mouse people talk.
It was a kind of music then, and
I would let go, drifting in an eddy—
no clipping of coupons, nor washing
of socks; no driving to and from doctors
for eczema, asthma, anxiety — releasing
fingers stiff from clutching the sides of the boat.
Today, I understand this raft of memory floats
backward, slipping toward water and sand,
children grown, photo stream dammed,
I learn to delete and to save.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kathryn Jordan is a writer and musician from Berkeley, CA. Two of her recent poems have been accepted by Maggie Smith as finalists in 2018’s Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest for The Comstock Review and will be published in January 2019. Her poem, “After Watching Ken Burns’ Vietnam” was selected by Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco as runner-up for Crossroads’ flash poetry contest 2018. Her chapbook, “Riding Waves,” a winner in the Emerging Women’s Voices Series, was published by Finishing Line Press in February, 2018. She is the 2016 winner of San Miguel de Allende Writer’s Conference Prize for Poetry and her work has been published in The Sun Magazine, Roar, Quiet Lightning, Bay Area Generations, and in the anthology, Solamente en San Miguel. Her short story, “Cookie,” won the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Prize for Short Story at UC Berkeley. She is an avid birder and she rambles in the East Bay hills, translating bird song to poems when possible.