Drinking Memory
Megan Ross


Growing up, my mother, water diviner
& secret keeper, who looped sunlight through
the sky — who kept old jam jars & fields & fields
of knitting patterns as if one held the template for
happiness — warned me against Ouija boards
& communion with spirits.

We knew that a woman had lingered in the passage
of her childhood home, of a spirit thick as mist
in her bedroom & when I am ten
& playing Glassy-Glassy, my bedroom
takes on the same quality, a cool dense dark;
dusk clotting above my teddy bears and dolls.

In fertile sleep I inherit my mother's dreams,
pleating my nights with the same ribbons of fear
& I am sure that this is no longer my room,
that in 1977 a house climbed into her pocket
& waited its turn to unfold like a letter in a new life
where it thought it could be rewritten.