Muscle Memory

It’s been almost a year from your crooked grin

and knobby knees,

the hollow in the chest

that ran in your family.

I can still remember every inch,

close my eyes and travel the soft peaks and golden valleys,

a foreign country made familiar.

Your voice is the rhyme that’s stuck in my head,

the words that stumbled over each other,

awkward consonants,

rough vowels.

English wasn’t your first language,

but you understood me perfectly.

But next to your memory,

I waver and disappear.

I can still write you tender,

But I cannot write myself true.