My mother would eat cottage cheese and fruit
—berries or a cut up apple—for lunch. Or a bran muffin
with yogurt. She liked grapefruit, had special spoons
for sectioning, saved the peels to dry and candy.
Saved all those cottage cheese containers.
Saved the letters we wrote from camp, from college.
Saved her own typed letters with carbon paper.
Saved every crayon, every rubber band.
All those eyedrops, but couldn’t save her eyesight.
Couldn’t save her memory, her words. All those
phone numbers and addresses she knew,
the lines of poetry, fell like snow. Nothing left
to save in the tangled winter of her brain. Mr. Harris,
she would say to my father. You are Mr. Harris?

 

Suzy Harris lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work has most recently appeared in Consilience (a Canadian journal), Triggerfish Critical Review and Clackamas Literary Review. Her chapbook Listening in the Dark, about hearing loss and learning to hear again with cochlear implants, was published by The Poetry Box in 2023.