Larry Oakner’s poem “Slippage” appears in the Spring 2020 issue of the Intima. — Larry Oakner’s poem “Slippage” appears in the Spring 2020 issue of the **Intima**.

As I age into my late sixties, I’m experiencing the blips of short-term memory loss that are common for many people my age. I find the experience a little frightening and disconcerting because I have always had great recall throughout my life, with deep detail and clarity of memories, right down to the emotions at the time.

But as I grow older, I’m finding it’s the everyday, small moments that don’t stick. It’s the missing word, a train of thought going off the track, the misplaced eyeglasses, or the double-checking of locked doors. The phase, “it slipped my mind” couldn’t be truer. That’s what prompted the poem “Slippage,” where I used common day-to-day occurrences to capture the “real time” experience of memory loss.

The word slippage has many different definitions. In finance, it’s the difference between the expected price of a stock trade and the actual executed price; it can be a geologic fault line; or a loss in a power outage. I wanted to catalog the different types of “slippage” I was experiencing through disappearance, dissolution, loss and instability.

In her poem “The Hospital Room of Understanding” (Fall 2019 Intima), the poet Hope Atlas depicts the end impact of memory loss. Her poem describes a daughter dealing with her aged father’s memory loss by sharing events from their common past. At his hospital bedside, she evokes pleasant memories for her father by playing his favorite music, bringing him calm. She helps him remember the shared moments of their life as a family, the times when they were lost on a road trip and her father’s “Dad jokes.” Through these interactions, she functions as his memory.

Together, these poems bookend the impact of memory loss from aging—mine as it just begins, and Hope’s when it ends.

Larry Oakner has published two books of poems, SEX LOVE RELIGION (Blind Tattoo Press, 2018), and The 614th Commandment, the latter under his pseudonym, Eleazar Baruch (Blind Tattoo Press, 2019), along with a chapbook, Sitting Still. His poems will be forthcoming in The Oddville Press and WINK. Oakner’s poems have appeared in Tricycle: Buddhist News, Lost Coast Review,The Jewish Literary Review, Kerem, Home Planet News and The Long Island Quarterly, among others. He received his M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California at Los Angeles. Oakner is co-editor of The Poem Shop, an open online poetry website.