Counterfeits by Aubrey Brady

Counterfeits

In the midst of dementia, my grandmother
refused to leave her wedding ring with a jeweler,
despite the way it slid from her thinning fingers,
convinced they would pluck the diamonds
and replace them with glass.
She forgot that each day, each minute
our cells are slipping from our bodies
making photocopies of photocopies
of themselves until we are a blurred
replica of the original.
Of course, I cannot know this for sure.
Perhaps the same people swapping
precious stones for melted sand
have also exchanged this knowledge
for a fake. But I have doubt down to an art,
unwavering confidence that I cannot know,
that she could have been right—
that each precious artifact could be
exchanged for a convincing counterfeit,
even this memory of her—a trick of neurons,
our brains, stuck in our skull, never
knowing the difference between
the checkered ground and the cosmos.

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Aubrey Brady studied music at Covenant College and received her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry at Lindenwood University. Her work has appeared in ONE ART, Ekstasis, Moria, Big Sky Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Montana with her husband, Matthew, and their two children. You can find her online at aubreybrady.com