Footnotes

I.

Back and forth we went,

trying to remember the word for words 

that sound the same but are spelled differently.

A word from our youths when we were taught this 

phenomenon in a classroom. 

 

It was childish for us to be leaning back, arms crossed,

looking at each other. As if the word might appear without us trying.

Part of me wanted to let the word die in our forgetfulness.

 

Through and threw, I said 

lite and light, bare and bear.

 

Jean and gene, you added.

 

The other part of me wanted to remember.

 

Onomatopoeia! I said.

 

No, that’s a word that makes a sound like boom or zip.

 

A man at the table next to us leaned over.

 

I think the word you two are looking for is homophone.

 

We said the word in unison. It exhaled from our lips in shared relief. 

 

II.

And like the Buddha, my day of enlightenment has arrived.

Nothing is guaranteed except the past which reads like footnotes to reference all the love worth forgetting.

1. Hands might help a man fall in love but not just from the sight of them
2. Hoping he’d at least fall in love with my hands
3. Never apologize for offering
4. Journals are important like memory because
5. one day, if this works out, we can talk about first impressions
6. Healed through sleep? Or slept through the healing?
7. Forgetting, once again, that days do not end like they begin
8. If you tell him to try poetry, his eyes might widen and become stiff because you just described his recount of finding God as beautiful and poetic
9. I drove home for the weekend and saw a new blue in the sky, the color of sleep. Mornings in October blue. The fog around my arms and torso blue. I saw new leaves and long, quiet fields as I drove (like Polish farmland). And I thought how appropriate it would be to fall in love during autumn. 
10. Is he a good friend to his mother?
11. How many colors do you sleep with?
12. Need and knead
13. Piece and peace
14. Flower and flour
15. Ewe and you