Memory is a Naked Woman 
               Looking into a Hand Mirror

The table is flipped on its back

Focus, it will never be like this
Again, lacquer each leg
Until it becomes abalone shell

You catch colors of your face
On each smooth surface, a power
Runs through your pulsing hands

Who would recognize you now

Water gallops in, foam as saddle,
& you stay exactly where you are

You anticipated this arrival

A shear of matted wool
Masks the infant, a faun

You don’t know the child
Reaching for your ankles

Vicki Vargas hails from the Lower East Side, Manhattan by the river no one washes in. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University, and her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Apogee Journal, and The Feminist Wire.