About what’s past, Hold on when you can, I used to say,
And when you can’t, let go,
let the wind blow through your heart.

Like a leaf clings to the tree,
I lived, in those days, at the forest’s edge–
You must keep what you’ve promised
very close to your heart, that way you’ll never forget
is what I’ve always been told.

I hear the sound of mandolins,
though lately it’s less the echo
itself that can still most surprise me about my memory—

For the metaphysical poets, the problem
with weeping for what’s been lost is that tears
wash out memory and, by extension, what we’d hoped
to remember.
All things to me
satisfy this hungriness.

It’s been my experience that
tears are useless against all the rest of it that, if I
could, I’d forget.

For we’re creatures of the wind,
I’m not done with you yet.

Note: This poem is a cento of Carl Phillips’ poem “Wild is the Wind” and the Nina Simone song “Wild is the Wind.”

Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Alexandria, Virginia. He is the author of Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry (Querencia Press, 2023) and May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He has had fiction, poetry, and literary reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Lambda Literary Review, Barrelhouse, Sage Cigarettes (Best of the Net Nominee, 2023), Stories About Penises (Guts Publishing, 2019), and more. For more information, visit carriganak.wordpress.com or on Twitter @carriganak.

Alex’s previous piece: In Review: Bodies of Separation by Chim Sher Ting (Issue 77)