Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets' daily poetry dispatch. Read "Watching that ol’ river flow" by Anne Archer.

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An AI takes in ten thousand cat videos

By Anne Archer

i

That first summer of your

forgetting—names

 

sloughed off like

so much dead skin

 

is there a choice?

 

(memory like the house guest who

puts the carving knife

in the wrong drawer, memory

 

the knife in the wrong drawer)

 

if you don’t remember you’ll improvise

 

some wordless melody, pieces

of you, beloved:

 

chk a dee dee       chk a dee

 

 

ii

Analogy is the bedfellow

of early Alzheimer’s, like

 

finding another word for whatchamacallit

 

eee bejeee bejeee eee bejeee bejeee

Is there a right way to hang laundry?

 

A branch snags

a scrap of your shirt

 

The pots on the verandah rearrange themselves as

you circle back on the trail, walking

 

widdershins instead of clockwise

 

All night the slither and crunch, sounds

truant as a melody or memory-

 

the current washing over you

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Copyright © Anne Archer

Previously published in Anti-Heroin Chic.

Anne Archer (aka Archer Lundy) is a poet and musician who lives on unceded Algonquin Territory near Sharbot Lake, Ontario. She is the author of 3 books of poetry, including EMMALINE/EVANGELINE (Woodpecker Lane Press, 2023) and plays flutes and whistles in SHENANIGANS with Jon McLurg and CACCIA with Chris Giguere. Her recent poetry appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Pinhole, Devour, Otherwise Engaged, and In The Mood Magazine.

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