(re)Listening to NPR in Atlanta

Part 1: for Plums and peaches

I listened to the voice of a woman
I knew nearly fifteen years ago, when
we teetered on the edge of adulthood.

I heard things that were, things that
were not, things that might have been.

I heard the girl next door
humming arias in the dark.

I heard Durham in August and
the diminishing of colloquialism
of South Carolina after the Return.

It was not like listening to the past.

Or living in Atlanta,
Manhattan and Denver.

Part 2: one year later

I visited the voice seven months
later and found photographs of an
unremembered me: a birthday party
and broken asphalt. I wondered if the

woman who kept it on her bookshelf
owned the memory in the photograph.
In some ways that day will always belong
to her, and I left unable to distinguish

how much of my re-collection was nothing
more than a picture of a picture. I wondered
how many fragments of my being are left scattered
in Atlanta; how much of my Self is left unremembered.

author, voice, and bookshelf

an earlier version of this poem appeared here