Three by
Andrew Leggett
FORGETTING WILL NOT BE EASY
Forgetting will not be easy
as losing the German language,
with declension of verbs in past imperfect,
as short as memory of the shrinking list
of names that once belonged to lovers;
as short as the skirt of teenage dreams
Debbie Harry wore on my poster wall.
I am losing the roses I stole,
from the beds of the medical school,
for my first object of reciprocal love,
but the hardest relinquishment of all
is that of the wish I was kissing
your cheeks the time you wore heels
and denim shorts with that ragged hem.
STRUGGLING FOR PARMESAN
At Mama’s Trattoria, ordering pasta
with a pork and fennel salicce ragu,
my brain flails its wings, fluffed
like the pinions of a frogmouth chick,
fallen from the nest, before flight
was imagined, frozen on the way down,
stuck when the film reel locked
in the rusty projector that illuminates
the screen in the cinema of phantom pain.
Nothing comes at all, not even the names
of pecorino romano, grana padana
or any other cheese that might
rescue me from tongue-tied shame
before a waitress offering parmesan.
ANAMNESIS
I am the revenant in his old town,
at the foot of the cinema stairs,
watching the art director’s back
as he ascends, two steps each stride.
He may not be the man whose son
I raised for eighteen years towards
his father’s love, the one who pelted
on horseback down the mountain
in The Man From Snowy River.
I don’t run after him and put
my memory to the face’s test.
Instead I turn to view the backs
of another two, a couple standing
in the place I imagine that I knew.
Andrew Leggett is an Australian author and editor of poetry, fiction, interdisciplinary academic papers and songs. In addition to medical degrees and postgraduate qualifications in psychiatry and psychotherapy, he holds a research Masters degree in creative writing from the University of Queensland and a PhD in creative writing from Griffith University. He was editor of Australasian Journal Of Psychotherapy from 2006-2011 and prose editor of StylusLit from 2017-2022. His third collection of poetry, Losing Touch, was published by Ginninderra Press in 2022.