Poetry By Anne Archer

       Mariia Honcharova CC




Watching that ol’ river flow


​
I
That first summer of your
forgetting—names

sloughed off like
so much dead skin

is there a choice?

(memory like the house guest who
puts the carving knife
in the wrong drawer, memory

the knife in the wrong drawer)

if you don’t remember you’ll improvise

some wordless melody, pieces
of you, beloved:

chk a dee dee     chk a dee





II
Analogy is the bedfellow
of early Alzheimer’s, like

finding another word for whatchamacallit

eee bejeee bejeee eee bejeee bejeee
Is there a right way to hang laundry?

A branch snags
a scrap of your shirt

The pots on the verandah rearrange themselves as 
you circle back on the trail, walking

widdershins instead of clockwise

All night the slither and crunch, sounds
truant as a melody or memory-

the current washing over you






Love, stay



with me
through the night


while the dark 
undresses, changes
shape


and things of flesh
and spirit bow
to gravity


and we all
have to die,
some not gently.

​




Imperfect Ghazal for the Children of the Last Czar’s Lost Daughter



I said how quickly we become
our stories, but I meant our mothers.


My mother was a fish
out of water, and my birth


mother a phantom limb remapped
to the heart by the body’s faulty


sensory circuitry.  How can
a heart know what it wants?


The leaf of the bloodroot wraps itself
around the blossom like a gowpen.

​

​
​Anne Archer (aka Archer Lundy) is a musician and poet who lives on unceded Algonquin Territory near Sharbot Lake, Ontario.  She is the author of two chapbooks: ICH HEISSE CLARA (Alien Buddha Press, 2021) and FROM THE FRONTENACS (Woodpecker Lane Press, 2022).  Her poetry appears in The Eunoia Review, Sledgehammer Lit, The Raven's Perch, The Wise Owl, In The Mood Magazine, Yolk, and Poetry Pause ( a poem-a-day feature from the League of Canadian Poets).