you can’t forget him, so you dipped your fingers in ink to paint another damned portrait of him. stroke, after stroke, you painted his head and his hair. you painted the whiteness of his eyes —a flood. you painted his nose, painted the smallness of his mouth, and every little feature of his oval face. you painted his body with all the petals jutting out of it as it morphed into another sanctuary for dead dreams. they say we do not choose what we remember, but we can choose how we remember, so you tell yourself this is how you want to remember him: beautiful, like the orangeness of the sky the night you tore into the softness of his body for the first time. but this is how it actually happened: you were at a seashore mourning his absence when you saw him walking out of the water:
a tiny rope in his right hand, a bag of stones in his left, seawater juggling inside his belly--
but this is not how you want to remember him, so instead, you dipped your fingers in ink and painted the hairiness of his chest.
Animashaun Ameen is a poet and essayist. His works have appeared/are forthcoming in Salamander Mag, RATTLE, LOLWE, BRINK, Foglifter Journal, Vast Chasm, and elsewhere. An MFA candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, he is the first runner-up of the 2023 Creative Manchester Poetry competition. An oddball. A butterfly. He tweets @AmeenAnimashaun.