One Day I Forget
by Lydia Gwyn 

          I forget the names of the flowers in the yard. I forget what it was we used as suitcases when we visited. I forget the kind of clothes you wore. I forget where the trees were before our grandfather cut them down. Once there were willows, I think, along the creek bank. I calculate in my head the two I recall, and the one I may be making up.  
          In my flying dreams, those are the trees I rise above, floating through the arms of their branches like a sigh from a throat, floating up to where I think I you would be. Floating like a crow from a field.  
          Our grandfather used to shoot the crows when they came to his gardens. As a child, I’d stand by the window, listening to his shots with panic in my chest, afraid to move the curtain, afraid of what I’d see. An arrest of wings, a bird gone slack in the sky, its body falling.  
          I forget what it was we played with our cousins, what pretend, what characters we became. Whatever it was, it completely consumed us, and we brought the drama from the yard to the dinner table and into our sleep. I became someone else every weekend, though I was still your big sister.  
          At night, I’d wake to our grandmother's snores, and I'd watch the orange glow of the heater coils in the floor unit. We loved to stand there on top of the metal grate when our feet were cold. You'd be in the rollaway bed with me. Sweaty hair, and a kid face that looked like a baby’s in sleep.  
          I forget the exact sound of your child voice. You had our father’s lips. The same lips all the Copeland men had. The same lips my son has now decades later.  
          Those days I was a light sleeper, and our grandmother's snoring didn't help. In the mornings, we’d wake early to the smell of meat sizzling and biscuits baking. Our grandmother would rise at some unknown hour, perhaps when it was still dark outside, and make breakfast for the whole house. Somehow, I never heard her wake, never noticed the snoring had subsided.  
          I forget the plates we ate from. I forget the silverware we used and the cups we drank from, but I remember the salt and pepper shakers, yellow lids capping a fat glass jar. I remember that all us cousins sat together on one long bench, and how for so many years, your feet couldn’t touch the floor.