THINGS I HAVE FORGOTTEN

 

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Names, dates, your birthday 

though I’ve spent 20 of them with you. 

The way home. How to do 

long division. How to swaddle 

a baby. Our  oldest son at school 

stranded by the band room, his sneakers kicking 

at loose gravel. Mother’s Day 

though I am a mother. Father’s Day 

though I have a father, though I have made 

of you a father. I’ve forgotten girlishness,

who I was  before the deep griefs

moved in with their  lead suitcases,

settling in  and turning off the lamps 

in the empty rooms  of my chest.

I’ve forgotten what it’s like 

to be alone, I who have loved 

and been loved 

so deliberately, so consistently, 

our sons’ need for me like a homing missile 

trained on the heat of me

as I run down  the tedious minutes of my day 

driving to work, or making small talk,

or heating my lunch  in the  microwave.

Forgotten—the wash  in the washing machine.  

The cat’s empty food bowl.  

The route to my best friend’s childhood house. 

Nothing is safe 

from the closefisted gelatin  

of my hapless brain 

capable of so much and yet still 

peddling recklessly like a monkey on a bicycle 

over the tightrope of my life. 

Remember that ordinary day 

in April when we stripped the stained wallpaper 

from our new bedroom 

and I asked about all your old  girlfriends? 

It must have made you feel young again 

thinking of the pretty faces and long legs 

I’d only ever seen in stacks of blurry  

photographs. What you did to me afterward. 

Even in the darkness, in the long hallway

I will eventually  walk down alone,

please let me never forget. 

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BIO:

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Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War (YesYes Books 2020), winner of the Pamet River Prize and A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart, forthcoming from LSU Press in 2026. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares among others. She has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Currently she is a PhD student in poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she is also a writing instructor.