Sarah Audsley
On Creating False Memory
late blooming golden rod sways in the uncut field
& all lays fallow until next year’s upward swing
so let the smoky wood-burn smell that won’t leave your clothes
linger from the bonfire the night before the laundry basket
still not full enough the smell wafts & makes you remember
two shoulders touching in straight-backed wooden chairs not-so-silent
skin on skin while the pulsing dark quickens crickets thrum their legs
strident chords no real harmony & remember feeling winded
from just two flights of stairs & remember sinking into a lake holding
you up & your entire body its own lake-river-pool-bathtub
a trace of you inside an unnamed uterus & everything you can’t remember
take it all back & the dreams come out of focus & reach towards
past lives you can’t hold & the horses ran away & came back
to the fields to gorge themselves off freshly dropped apples
& remember a new moon powerful quicksilver than full & rising & rising
nowhere & remember a bulge of amethyst like a bird’s egg of what’s solid
the stone not the filaments that I’ve managed to warp & weave through un-fulfilled
hearts like cornhusk silk threaded through holes in the sieve
Sarah Audsley reads “On Creating False Memory”
Sarah Audsley has received support for her work from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and serves as the Writing Across Media Facilitator at Vermont Studio Center and the Managing Director of Sundog Poetry Center.