The Amnesiac’s First Moments         after his memory was lost Red Riding Hood I could remember well, the smell of coffee, and Achilles, the thug who ran so fast. I still knew how to spell ''absurd.'' I could recall the phrase I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room, the Moon- light Sonata, the film of Mr. Kane. It felt as if some great selective broom had whisked along the hallways of my brain and swept up every cobweb of the me in there, and left the rest all as before: the address of the White House, the filigree that's on the backs of dollar bills, the roar of MGM, a million other live details—but not how any of them arrived. By Loren Graham

Loren Graham was born and raised around Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. He studied as a writer and composer at Oklahoma Baptist University, and he received an MA in English from Baylor University and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia. He has since taught English and creative writing in Virginia and in Montana. Poetry collections include Mose (Wesleyan, 1994), The Ring Scar (Word Poetry, 2010), and Places I Was Dreaming (CavanKerry, 2015). Graham won the Oklahoma Book Award for poetry in 2016.