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Time Traveler
I am contemporaneous, fluid, a time traveler, a shape shifter,
a creature
of then, now and all moments in between. I loiter
on a sidewalk
outside a fifth-grade classroom watching palomino Pamela Randall,
the most beautiful girl
in Marin County, erase the blackboard for our teacher.
Freckled, stick-figured Becky
Newlin smirks at me as she reaches with a wooden yardstick
and lifts
Pamela's pleated gray skirt until her peach-colored panties
are exposed,
clinging to the firm flesh of her trim rump. I stand
below the pulpit
at First Methodist Church watching a girl in silk and satin
glide down the aisle
toward me on the arm of her disapproving father, thinking:
this is not happening,
this is not happening, this is not happening. I peer
in a mirror,
two o'clock on a Tuesday morning, studying snow in my mustache,
sag in my jawline,
glistening skin where my pompadour used to be. I race
to first base
on the Valdosta Little League field, legging out a grounder
into the hole
at short. I cross the bag, turn to look for the ball as it
ricochets off
the first baseman's mitt. It hits me in the mouth, loosens four
front teeth,
makes me spit blood. I won't eat apples for a month.
All these things
I do at once. My wife, who can't remember where she slept
on the night
she married, believes I invent or embellish my past.
I don't.
I live it, just as I live the present. It is with me always.
—David Jordan
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