The Footprints I Didn’t Leave
By Derek Ellwood
As I peer over a fence laced with patches of pogonip,
My eyes are drawn to a thin amber line of sky that
Sketches itself along the tips of frosted mountains.
Ridged frames tower in the distance.
As I also feel in the distance.
The crisp winter morning is a breath I can see.
With every breath I draw, I
Exhale in reflection.
The razor wire spirals across a barrier that boxes me into my existence,
My reality.
Just beyond my cage, through cobwebbed windows shuttered with rusted crossbars,
My prospect is veiled; yet I extend my vision beyond my containment.
Paint on the iron bars peeled like the corners of labels curling from discarded
Beer bottles I once retrieved alongside the John Day River.
Picking wildflowers and shoving them down the throats of those longnecks
I would sit them atop weathered fence posts precariously strung together
By rusty barbed wire,
Barbed wire meant to keep me out rather than keep me in.
Leaving footprints on the sandy banks of the river, my father’s just
Ahead of mine, fishing would begin –
Life would begin.
How to tie a knot, how to cast a line, how to avoid hazards, and I thought
We were just fishing.
Curving back into my capture, my days are late.
Taken leave, is the thin amber line.
Lingering are guard towers and razor wire
Once again spiraling upon my permanence
And stringing up my deliberations.
Ruminations of how selfishly I fucked up my own life, leaving no footprints
For a son to follow.
Closing my eyes, my thoughts eddy around the pools of the past.
For a moment, I am close to those waters again, close to those footprints, yet fat from
The footprints I did not leave.
Forget Me Not
By Derek Ellwood
Early Alzheimer’s was the diagnosis.
I did not sink.
Soon was the realization of the things that would cloud me:
When to eat,
The panicked grasp to recognize the faceless person I was talking to, the
Whispering eyes, staring at me from
Loved ones who were once not strangers.
So I gathered what thoughts I had
Amongst the bushes of huckleberries at Barview.
The same place my mother and I gathered them,
Laughing over the ones smeared all over my
Face, that didn’t make it into the bucket.
I sat on the old railroad tracks and sealed my eyes on the Coast Guard station,
Leaking out into Tillamook Bay, admiring how it steadied itself on
Barnacle and mussel-encrusted stillettos.
A cry from a long gull jarred my thoughts around reflection from the
Puzzle pieces that were about to go missing.
The shapes, depths, emotions that fit together
To form me would soon be
Permanent holes.
Alone, I tried to conceal my tears
Like the pier falling off into the
Abyss of a veiled fog.
I became an old fisherman in the Ghost Hole
Watching a collision of colored dragon-tailed streamers
Tangle and race through the fall skies over Garibaldi. We were an infusion, a graft of each other
Not fretting about forgetting.
When when my chest no longer
Rises like the incoming tides, these would be the things that would
Not forget me.
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