By Fay Dillof

It wasn’t hard,
my mother said.
With a sad
mother-in-law
and two toddlers
in her house,
she was busy.
Plus, the NICU
was a 30-minute drive away.
And she didn’t drive.
So concerning
her new baby––
out of sight,
out of mind.
A strategy
which, because it worked,
became the trick
my infant brain learned
to play as well.

                                                                                 •

                                                                        Why is it, a friend asks, you don’t trust anything unless you can kiss it?

•
If
I
recall
every
word
of
a
song
I
learned
when
my
child
was
small
in
which
archipelago
was
rhymed
with
said
hello,
why,
every time my husband returns from a trip and sees the way I look at him,
does he have to ask Remember me?

                                                                       Hello?

•

                                                                         Like chains of islands . . . stretching across three sections of the brain . . . neural pathways

                                     form––fast––during experiences of
high intensity . . . then later reactivate, through associative . . .

leaps . . .

                                                                    causing–– thwack !–– . . . flash-

backs . . . as in when my cousin . . . who’s been shot at . . . heard his friend . . .
yet another friend . . . had been . . . It’s an automatic
response . . . the instant recall of terror . . . the sense . . . sudden . . . intrusive and

interrupting . . . that it’s happening

                    again . . . when are trigg . . . thwack . . .

thwack-thwack thwack-thwack . . .

•
I wanted to die
when my child was born.
Postpartum, I was pumped
to jump in front of cars,
be eaten by flames, brawl––anything
to save her. I called this
a mother’s instinct to protect.
What it felt like, though,
was lust.

                                                                •                                                   
                                                                One way to communicate lust
                                                                in ASL is by tracing a line from the head
                                                                down
                                                                to
                                                                the
                                                                nape
                                                                of
                                                                the
                                                                   neck,

                                                                like this:

                                                                                                                                •                               
                                                                                                                                Remember when
                                                                                                                       you showed me another?

•
I had a friend when I was young
who had a rat named Memory.

Do you want to hold her?

                                                                   •                                                     
                                                                Daughter, the day                        

                                                                you were born, I placed two hands

                                                                in front of my chest,       
                                                                making the sign for door,            

                                                                and out, from the shadows , tiptoed
                                                                                                                                                a deer.

---

Fay Dillof’s poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, FIELD, and Green Mountains Review. Her poems have won the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize and the Dogwood Literary Prize and have been supported by a John Ciardi Scholarship from Bread Loaf, a Claudia Emerson Scholarship from Sewanee, and an Anne Bastille Residency. Dillof lives with her husband and daughter in Northern California, where she works as a psychotherapist.