Listen: there is no proof that this moment,
silver nitrate and sparkling, will be remembered.
Everything disintegrates; the blue-black
stain on the daguerreotype, silk shatter
from water and color and sun, the accident
of turning your face away. The poet
who wrote someone will remember us
wrote, sometime later, you will die
and no one will remember you; less beautiful,
less of an ache, less of a promise,
but Plutarch remembered, and it survived,
love poet to love poet, an accident of paper
and thought. Imagine all of this
not-catalogued, just-missed, blotted
into the unreadable; then perhaps turn
anyway. Send the careful plait of hair
and the broad forearm forward dizzily
into the future; imbue in the body all we are.
—MJ Cunniff
MJ Cunniff lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and is a PhD candidate in the English department at Brown.
