Aaron Simm

MEMORY LANE

You press your body against the railing of
the ferry holding a globe, ready to drop it
into the inclement waters of Lake Erie hoping
that the scoured lifeboat will erode the names

of all the countries you have visited and leave
you a naked ball with no topography. It hangs
for a moment just above the swell, your travel log
a barrel filled with recollections, the percussion

blood in your head its own surge of Niagara
You drag buckets of water from its basin and
hold them above campfires you can barely
remember, you tell yourself ghost stories

and send smoke signals to overcast skies, as
the photographs are being developed, you throw
open the curtains to your dark room, the garish
rays of the mid-afternoon sun effacing the trip to

Disney World from your memory you feel your
retinas burning at the thought of your brother
crying mocked by grown men in giant suits
Every Thanksgiving you make stuffing from

the breadcrumbs of your fairy tales and you
order wrecking balls to the hospital you were
born in the colouring books locked in your
parents’ basement vibrating outside the lines

You manage to start a fire from maps of suburban
Toronto and throw your thumb upwards against the
gravel road leaving behind undeveloped photographs
of roaring waterfalls and naked blue globes barely

visible beneath them. The pulse of your old bruises
is stained onto the maps you have collected and the
edges of your memory are blurring like a temporary
tattoo, the mark on your arm you can’t find anymore

Aaron Simm is a poet, playwright, and hip-hop artist, from Winnipeg. He is the co-founder of the Winnipeg Spoken Word Festival, and his work has been published in CV2, text, and the forthcoming issues of after the pause, rip/torn, and cede. His work has been featured on stages all across the country.