PSALM IN THE SPIRIT OF AMNESIA

There must be something, I suppose,
about a mother—is she a ship, or

is that a battle I’m thinking of? We all
learned about the Civil War in high

school, one of the least civilized times
in our history. You decide which.

I thought I heard someone say herstory.
Was I part of that great ocean wave of women

who didn’t like the men inside them?
But that’s a lesbian, isn’t it, which I know I am

because my lover tells me so. Is it spelled
the same as a sewing machine, the great white

Singer mothers passed to silent daughters,
one generation after the next?

Sew came before sex in the elementary
encyclopedia when I was a curious kid

always reading for information omitted
at home. On the home front? Or is that a

battle, too? Which is the one that pigeons do?
Home or hone? Are we homing our skills

as we make our kill-devil getaways?
In other words, which way is always?

Which one was Diderot? Can you tell me
that much? Can I have it that way? Tell me,

Lover, tell me, Stranger, tell me Nurse with
the Garfield scrubs. Why can I remember a

cartoon cat and not my own lips that name him,
my own eyes that rove these neutral walls,

my own hands that reach for the water glass,
still clumsy, still certain that it’s full.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of Wishbone, a Memoir in Fractures, Without: Poems, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, Tremolo: An Essay, When I Was Straight: Poems, Catechism: A Love Story, and SIX: Poems. She has won numerous awards, including the Colgate University Press Nonfiction Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes, eighteen Pushcart Prize nominations, and many more awards. Her work appears at the Academy of American Poets, The Kenyon Review, The Lost Angeles Review, The Rumpus, and many others. She teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for The Rumpus and Lambda Literary Review. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives in the Sunshine State.