Time makes a voodoo
doll of my body.
With its ten-thousand needles
sharp as second hands,
time pricks my skin, pokes
my viscera, trying to get at my mind’s
velvet archive of cottonwoods
and cottonmouths. Memory is
a shifting shoreline,
ragged as an envelope torn open,
spilling out what had been sealed away.
Time’s two longest needles, past and future,
click against each other as they knit a filigree,
the net of the now I am caught in,
waiting to be cast off, finished, torn closed.
Instead, I’m torn open again, this time
by a video on YouTube, a firefighter’s training
film, footage in which my childhood home burns
down, over and over, in a flash-
over that started in the family
room. Again I watch, and again. It is good
practice. Even in the final frame, so much smoke.