Sideways

It’s not memory loss exactly, nor amnesia, that empty chamber buzzing long after the bomb goes off. More like a brand of memory displacement, like a flood has taken the house and knocked it sideways, depositing half its contents in the backyard. Out for a night piss you place your beer down on a stump and there’s your high school girlfriend, an entire volume of your friends’ poetry, and the ’76 Denver Nuggets’ starting five, freezing in their tiny shorts, all afros and stringy white-boy hair, swaying like poorly trimmed elms.