Forget-me-nots

from Miracle Strip by Matt Layne

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about

Music:
Isaac Charlemagne, Composer
Maddalena Ohrbach, Soprano
Ramilya Saubanova, piano
Performed on Feb 14, 2020 at Griswold Hall, Peabody Institute

lyrics

Forget-me-nots

In July of 1975, I jarred fireflies in my grandparents' backyard.
As I slept, their light constellated a desperate galaxy,
but the next morning only six still glowed weakly. I tilted
the pale yellow milk of insect bodies into the monkey grass.

The next night seven moonbeams shone on the lawn.
Mother, May I, and Ghosts in the Graveyard, lit
with a light so strange, the memory seems impossible:
a lucid dream or a picture from a book. But I remember

Pop-pop’s red face when I refused a mush of boiled brussels sprouts.
I remember how the television-knob slipped gun-metal-guilty
into my palm when I changed channels, and I remember
the punishments that followed.

The rest of the summer was a mason jar jammed full
of anger and shame until the night I rose in the dark
and sleep-walked onto moon-wet grass.
I woke to the cry of a fox.
Its bark, the sound of a child calling out in the night.

credits

from Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022
Music:
Isaac Charlemagne, Composer
Maddalena Ohrbach, Soprano
Ramilya Saubanova, piano
Performed on Feb 14, 2020 at Griswold Hall, Peabody Institute

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about

Matt Layne Birmingham, Alabama

Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet's nests and looking under rocks since he was knee-high to a peanut peg.
I reckon you oughta check him out.