By Emily Pérez

Featured Art: Woman Writing by Zabitz

Quite suddenly, at least it seems in retrospect
Though I still seek a complete

My relationship to my past
It was as if my past had taken

Without warning, understand,
Had slipped in such a way that it uncovered

No, that’s not right, for it suggests a lack of deliberate
It wasn’t that I didn’t try

And I don’t mean that there were crimes, but
How can I

Rather, without ceasing to mean, my memories
They were to be handled and observed without

As if they
Or maybe they

I discerned the possibility of the hidden
And I set out to find

Should I have been ashamed that
True, it may not have been too late, but

So I gathered what I knew to
It wasn’t the truth, exactly, more of a

That was the feeling. And on the strength of it
I undertook to write.

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Emily Pérez is the author of House of Sugar, House of Stone, and the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Emerging Critic, her work has appeared in RHINO, Cosmonauts Avenue, Prairie Schooner, and The Guardian. She is a high school teacher in Denver where she lives with her family.

Originally appeared in NOR 3