Written by: Charlotte Ungar
Co-First Place Winner of the 2025 Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest
Of all I forget, I remember, the almond blossom painting
in your room, naked, your limbs sprawled out—
eyeing those bending branches
Coiling, climbing one another to end a flower.
The blue between the stems. How Van Gogh never visited Japan
yet saw it everywhere. Delusion or projection? Kyoto
Or France? I remember feeling older than the trees
more touched than fleshed root veins more discontinued
than thigh scar tissue. I remember smoothing a finger
Down your face, knowing each nose bone.
I remember looking into black water, night gleam blurring
sky for reflection, rolling behind my eyes.
I remember rose and rosemary and peonies.
I remember the taxi driver on the corner of 52nd whispering,
good bye beautiful, his words grimed, stretching
Around fifth avenue, tough like taffy mulled in the mouth.
I remember the teeth of men who’ve loved me. Of the folding
of moments never faded. What keeps memory
Rogue? Are we not, scatterings of obsession? Gatherings
of paused particulars, lesions plied open at the question.
Time follows in this: our drawn ons, those walled white irises winding.
Tell me something true.
