it’s a myth that fish have no memory

“. . . from the sleeping
lovers no one else will write about in greek, nor latin
nor lit moon sky.”
~ Keegan Lester

to walking when summers were written
long before our graves. how you loved
breaking the rain with the top of your hand.
speaking wasn’t only words & voice leaving
the body & breaths didn’t just wait.
when you pointed out how there’s memory
in the trees & when the wind makes them
sway, how that sound you hear is a promise
being made. to when I asked you, “promise
of what?” & you said: “no, promise of when,
which are always the toughest to keep.”

to when you asked me: “you speak spanish?”
but not the way my middle school spanish teacher
once did when i failed to properly conjugate
caber (to fit), caer (to fall), dar (to give),
& estar (to be) in the present tense.
to when i blamed my mother for it.
for choosing to teach me how to survive
first (sobrevivir) instead of worrying about
her son who would, eventually, be teased
for sounding just like a gringo. but for you,
I answered, “yes, or course i do.”

to when you asked me how to properly say
“save” in spanish & I mistakenly told you
guardar. but that wasn’t the kind of saving
you’d asked for that day. or were you asking
at all?

Born and raised in Miami, FL, Michael J Pagán spent four years (1999-2003) in the United States Navy before (hastily) running back to college during the spring of 2004. A graduate of Florida Atlantic University’s Creative Writing M.F.A. program, his work has appeared in Apogee Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, Juked, Hunger Mountain, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, BlazeVOX, Hobart, Revolver, ANMLY, The Florida Review and Frontier Poetry among others. He now resides in Lake Worth, FL where he serves as an Associate Professor of English Composition and Literature at Palm Beach State College.