Rinkitink, etc.

“I want to be forgotten”

I said to the copper mirror on the dresser

so I could see my lips form the syllables

and watch the way my teeth grind
against my bottom lip on forgotten.

I stood with my hands at my sides,
my fingers resting on the hem of my shorts
while the words flew from my tongue 
and vanished into the empty house.

I want to be forgotten like the books 
pushed into the back of the attic 
crawl space at my parent’s house,
packed away in old filing boxes.

They’re the ones I push aside when I climb
the wooden ladder from my old bunk beds and 
scrape my knees on the plywood floor
to pull out our family photo albums.

I wonder what it would be like to curl up
beside them, folding my body into the
water stained cardboard boxes and rest
against their rigid spines.

 

To breathe in the smell of age,
stale and comforting at the same time, 
and imagine how it feels to be untouched 
for twenty-five years.

To know that if you cracked open 
their stiff spines and folded back their
yellowed edges, their pages would
be impossibly white in the fluorescent light.

I want to be with them so I can be forgotten
kindly. So I can listen to the shuffle of my dad’s
socks on the brown linoleum and know that, 
while I’m buried beneath dust, tucked up 
against the fireplace vent, he doesn’t miss me.

He’s forgotten I’m there at all.