I doubted everything
and I believed everything.
It was my theology or affliction.
My first memory
was a story my mother told
which never happened.
My second memory
was unphotographed and lost forever.
When I left a woman,
I left her twice
and I felt
just what I’d watched
others feel
while I sat open-mouthed before the screen.
Shannon Holman, New York, 2002
published in Raised in a Barn