Souvenir

By J.C. Elkin

Art © Guillaume Luisetti

When, at eighty-eight, a woman forgets that her bébé lives far away, that her husband has
passed, that she once kept a cottage neat as a shop and before that, her sisters teased her, la
plus petite et belle, for being deaf and dull, making her ride behind Papa so his chewing tabac
flew in her face –when all she retains is her sense of self, still so sweet and lovely when she’s
wheeled into the atrium wearing a white blouse as crisp as she would have starched it herself –
does she really want to be cured, to souvenir when she’s forgotten even her French, her first
tongue?
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J.C. Elkin is founder of the Broadneck Writers’ Workshop in Annapolis, Maryland (www.broadneckwritersworkshop.com). She is also a singer, theater critic, and the author of World Class: Poems Inspired by the ESL Classroom. Her prose and poetry appear domestically and abroad in such journals as Kansas City Voices, Kestrel, Angle and The Delmarva Review.