Real Memory

By Michael Abraham

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Unseated by it, six years old maybe,

maybe 7    My dad tries to clean something with grease        My mom says it won’t work

But he does it, and it doesn’t work    The thing becomes greasy

I don’t exactly recall what the thing was

Not very good with childhood memories, really, and it bothers me, because other people are Unsettling, that memory, I always thought

The thing was something metal    Some part of a boat    Bright metal, too, caught the sunlight, nervous flickering

Nervous flickering of the sunlight

It didn’t matter that the grease could be felt, and could be seen, too

Not so important that you could see the grease, as that the grease stole off the shine of the metal

Some foreign murkiness that crept, with the neighborhood cat, into the garage

I stood there watching them watch the metal thing that was now greasy And we laughed, and we laughed,

and we laughed

Originally published 12/09/15