Forensic Poetry with Susie Morice, April 24, 2024

Keepsakes

I gave myself a drawer to store
a lifetime of toys and memories:
· Precious bookmarks–each with a story
· my Covid diary
· a 50-yen bank note from 1940 (I just used Google Lens to identify that)
· other currency—riyals, rupees, dinars
· coins—including three silver dollars with the birthyears of my grandparents
· a tiny worry doll
· a homemade piano solo CD of my daughters’ playing
· my birth year coin set
· early publications of mine
· Fazal, (a little frog a student made for me)
· a Tell-A-Tale Disney book called Beaver Valley (that my mom bought me in the grocery store in first grade when I learned to read. Mrs. Rhodes had one at school too.)
· a letter from my older brother about my upcoming wedding
· the original Life magazine issue with an “unprecedented photographic feat in color” of the “Drama of Life Before Birth”—from 1965–the same year my very first nephew was born with multiple birth defects from first trimester rubella
· a manicure set my brother gave my grandma in 1954
· 28 peace doves from the hearts of sand dollars
· my first passport
· dried flowers and a journal from a trip across the west when I was a junior in high school,
· Fonzie socks my mom and sister got me (randomly for Valentine’s Day one year)
· my baptism certificate
· my husband’s baby book (holding his only keepsakes, safely tucked into the mess of mine)
· my first letter to the editor (when I finally became brave enough to speak up in public),
· a folder of letters from authors to my students (before the Internet and webpages)
· a tiny wool lamb (remnant of an over-the-top sheep collection I once held)

The drawer is accessible,
next to my bed in the bottom drawer of my nightstand.
I look forward to the day when my grandson will sit on the floor,
looking through my riches,
asking “What’s this?”
and I will give him
whatever he wants.