Hannah Rogers

Scarecrow

You literally remember your childhood as sunny.

what is a lover’s childhood? by necessity, it is

the imagined past that makes the crucial now.

You are convincing me that the parts

we are remembering together: the cherries,

the straw baskets, the smell of the straw itself —

how can it be inconsequential that you were born

to the sea, or in an apartment, or in a hospital

with eight rooms? it must matter to the love we

are about to make, if anything matters at all—

the night-colored bicycle, the stockings worn thin

from Christmases, if you tell me not to ask or refuse

to tell or make up something that was not the case,

I will still know what you really felt, how it mattered,

if not what it was— when you press close.