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Sustenance of Memory

https://readspoems.com/abc/xyz/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Sustenance-of-Memory.m4a

A luminous blackness is what I recall entering
before dawn the autumn I was twelve to do my paper route,
in a grid of streets with European and Iroquois names.

From home on Montcalm Street overlooking Lake Ontario,
I zigzagged along streets named
Van Buren,
Cayuga,
Schuyler,
and Seneca
until I arrived at the alley alongside the Oswego River,
where we paperboys rolled the Syracuse Post-Standard
into porch-seeking missiles.

Now, a bleak time suck is what I imagine when I consider
googling “news fall 1962,” to add a veneer of verisimilitude
over my memory from boyhood, as if our missiles needed warheads.

But memory doesn’t need facts, only honesty –
we’ll be sustained by that, plus a mouthful of nouns.

– Dave Read

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