Kevin Brown

After the Fact

You were wearing a dress, some shade of blue,
the first time we met.  Perhaps purple.
Since it was summer, it was a sundress,
I think; I don’t distinguish types.  It was
not flattering. I later told you you looked chunky.
 
I didn’t want to date you.  The second time
you wore a t-shirt and shorts, more fitting for you
and me.  You were standing in front of a theater,
waiting for a group of us to see a movie
we would not remember.  That was when I knew
 
we would work.  Perhaps.  Scientists can cause
people to remember wrong road signs.
They show them pictures of intersections
and ask them wrongly worded questions,
 
so people see a stop or yield sign where
the other actually was.  Perhaps you told me
about the t-shirt or dress months later,
when we used to talk about how and where
we met, talked about the jokes you told
 
me after everyone had left the movie, how sweet
tea tastes like dirty water, something Southerners
would take issue with.  You told them again,
six months later, to another young man,
 
as I stood beside you both, unbelieving.
I didn’t laugh, that time.  Neither did he.
At least, that’s how I remember it.

---

I’m a Very Good Driver, As Well

We cannot remember everything,
our cortexes regularly wiped
clean of names and faces, phone
numbers and addresses, days
 
we say we will never
forget.  We need room for new
lives.  But it seems I am
some sort of idiot
 
savant of remembering,
a Rainman of what once was
in my life, so I know I kissed you
 
one thousand four hundred
and twelve times.  I told you
I love you nine hundred
eighty-six, and you said you wanted
 
to walk away six different
ways on twelve different days.
And you did once, while I
 
counted your steps, past the door
you closed behind you until
I could no longer hear you:
forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight.



--
Kevin Brown is a Professor at Lee University. He has published two books of poetry--A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press) and Exit Lines (Plain View Press, 2009)--and two chapbooks: Abecedarium (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and Holy Days: Poems (winner of Split Oak Press Chapbook Contest, 2011). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, then Finding It Again (Wipf and Stock, 2012), and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels (Kennesaw State University Press, 2012). He received his MFA from Murray State University.