remember by Kat Heatherington

              Tim Vrtiska CC



remember

remember not that you argued
with your sister, but that you sang
in the kitchen alone,
and the house remembered
a sound it had not heard in years.
remember fireflies blinking
slowly in the roadside dark
and a night sky as open
as the Arizona night sky –
remember, on the last night, every star
in the heavens shone on that place.
a comet streaked to the east
bright as a firecracker, potent, silent.
remember the vine that entered the door
and the softness of your father's voice
and the way his eyes lit up
every time he looked up and saw you there.
remember his pleasure, and his pride.
the way the creek sank when the rain stopped,
the six-part insect harmony every night,
and his hand on your shoulder,
blessing you. remember
his hands when he talks,
his big, precise gestures,
his carefully kept and yellowing fingernails.
the black trees in silhouette
against a star-strewn horizon.
his voice, retelling
the story of your birth – when the nurse
handed you to me, i felt a love
i had never known before.
and it has never stopped.
the scent of honeysuckle,
a redolent night,
that infinite sky.
it has never stopped.

​

*remember first appeared in Heatherington's chapbook The Bones of This Land, (Swimming with Elephants, 2017.)

Kat Heatherington is a queer ecofeminist poet, sometime artist, pagan, and organic gardener. She lives south of Albuquerque, NM in Sunflower River intentional community, sunflowerriver.org.  Kat’s work primarily addresses the interstices of human relationships and the natural world. She has one chapbook, The Bones of This Land, printed by Swimming with Elephants Publications in fall 2017, available on amazon.com.  Her work can be read at https://sometimesaparticle.org, or on instagram at @sometimesaparticle.

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