Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

other memory

what do the cells
of my hand remember?
my ankle? pancreas?
eyelid? what patterns
do they hold onto?
outside the brain
memories move—fluid-like
connected by nerve
endings & fibrous tissue,
sinew & bone
are they in color
or black & white?
are they patterns
of movement,
shapes repeated,
spatial relationships:
s-curves & the
distance of my
foot to the ground
or images: a blinking
traffic light, a
blinking eyelash,
a screen vibrating
shades of gray
and your hair that
day tucked neatly
behind your ear?
or do they hold emotions:
cellular memories
of emotional breakdowns,
frantic fumblings,
angry tirades,
love encapsulated
in bile ducts
or achilles tendons?
fire up the humming
record in my bones
the distant document
in my teeth of each
moment waking
or asleep
or somewhere
in between

Wanda Phipps is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her books include Mind Honey, Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire, and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Theater Translation Fund, and others. She was also a curator at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and her poems have been translated into Ukrainian, Hungarian, Arabic, Galician and Bangla.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx