Do I remember Yesterday
by EThan Huynh
This isn’t the same audience from the 6th-grade play
No, it felt more divine, something I could grasp once I opened the drawers,
as a watcher of myself, rummaging thinned papers that had shaped the thoughts of a little kid
They were once fresh when I was running through glades picking bark off trees
How could that have been possible now with these looped lights and Chinese white vases
I have to keep them clean, the matter was more complex than wishfulness
Do I remember yesterday?
Yet this mind naively rehearsed lines just as teeth etched into apples
and where was it I sat on the roof pretending I was the ninja of the night eating
nothing but last night’s action movie
because I never knew how it ended
it was only last week I thought I had nothing else but to wait for the morning bus to take me
Like clocks running on fleet-footed heels
And the little boy who wrote letters to Santa and painted vases, he thought
Do I remember yesterday?
It seemed ten sunsets ago, really it was thousands, that he did not care
whether glass got tainted, whether lights blinked
Where peaking clouds parted paths I wish I’d flown
Ninjas on roofs seemed recent
These are looped lights, great heights, for something to write about in those letters
Do I remember yesterday?