THE WAY OF TIME / TOM BARLOW
Our wedding album, and I am challenged
to name the faces in the guest photos.
I fail miserably. My mind has been coming apart
a stitch at a time, like the rag doll my sister
wrestled from our dog Willie’s mouth, who
had thrashed it to break its cotton neck.
Isn’t that the way of memory, to nail a
trivial moment like that to your forehead
and knock aside any recollection of your mother
on your fifth birthday, like it had never really
happened and you’ve been four your entire life
and that dog never died, and that doll was never
abandoned and your sister never took her hair
out of pigtails and you never picked up a familiar
book and found the words perplexing.
That’s the way of time, too; relentless, like
the draw of a fireplace on a windy night, or the
weight of the blanket you share with someone
you are almost sure you know.
TOM BARLOW / COLUMBUS, OH
Tom Barlow is haunted by the memory of the fifth-grade teacher who first described him as ungovernable. Time has sadly confirmed her words. His body has had it in for him since he was two and swallowed a penny, which would be a quarter today. He recently Googled his own name only to discover that the person who showed up was a baseball player who invented the bunt. Tom’s work is, apparently, less noteworthy than the bunt. A career is not working for him because he gave up that shit and never went back. His hint: marry a wife with a working compulsion. His artist’s ego has grown calluses thick as a ball glove, so even a good fastball won’t damage it. As far as the god in question, Tom is more likely to cast blame than plead for favor. Thinking about death leads him to ponder where we were before we were born, as he presumes we’ll all be returning there. He hopes it’s nice.
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