Strange what half-memories find you, creep
through some crack you failed to seal—
You’re alone in a parking lot. Soiled ice
snaps beneath your shoes. You’re ashamed
of something you said to her,
in a room beyond this lot, past the bar, far
out in the gray where the day's fog clots
over all you can't remember—
it mattered so much before
you forgot
all but the shame,
that frozen lot, how somewhere
she must still hate you,
or not.
J.G. McClure holds an MFA from the University of California – Irvine. His poetry and prose appear widely, including in Gettysburg Review, Green Mountains Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Nashville Review, The Pinch, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, among others. His work was selected for Best New Poets by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, and has been nominated for awards and honors including the Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, and Best of the Net. McClure is the author of The Fire Lit & Nearing (Indolent Books 2018) and the translator of Swimming (Valparaiso Ediciones 2019), and teaches a variety of online poetry and prose writing courses.