Cori A. Winrock

[Bias 1]: Singular Orphic Selves

                                       Who controls the past controls the future:
                                       who controls the present controls the past.
                                                          —George Orwell, 1984
1.
Momentary sensation
of a remembered whole:
two months after you died


your letters kept
arriving: Hello.


2.
A finite set
of surviving


neuro-chemical coordinates.
X (0,1): My love, you are
inaccessible.


3.
Memories are actually memories
of memory. Here, they are


twinned


in opulence,
fuzziness; washed


in architecture.


4.
Here, the temporary
constellation of memory;
Y(-1, 0): Your heart,


the right half
of a split-brain patient

the entire atmosphere


of our mind lighting
up chemically. Flickering
electrical: (picture


the lightning
storm above the kitchen sink
as the halogen
bulb switches on).


5.
We were searching—
but there was no way to pin-
point the first, lost


memory. We were inside
unfilled consciousness:
pellucid, dreaming.


6.
Z (-1:1), Who we were: amendments
of the way we are


now. Situations were devised:
each hemisphere of us


digested without awareness
of what the other was


experiencing.


7.
That last night we were wave-
touching, our brain
making our hands


heavy with sleep. The magnets
were left too close
to our temples, erased
us entirely:


old snow, a white blowing
into the folds—this firn, our
winter mind.


Cori A. Winrock
"[Bias 1]: Singular Orphic Selves" first appeared in Mid-American Review, Vol. XXVII Number 2 (Spring 2007).