Sonnet for a Lesion on the Fusiform Gyrus

I have lost her
letters—the ones where she called me jellyfish and praised
my soft hands. They are rotting
somewhere in my old house: the ink bleeding
into the folds of wide-ruled paper.

I try to think of her face
when my skin stings—burning
from the inside. A neural process has failed;
either she cursed me or she did not
when she etched spells into doodles of tentacles.

This brain muddles the past;
I want to have made her up in a dream.

But every face we see is a face we have seen before, even just once.
We make memories into secrets from ourselves—a natural defense.