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This week’s poem, Suzanne Langlois’ “How Memory Comes,” pulls us into rich, involuntary sense memories of a day in a rural childhood. I love how effortlessly an autumn cornfield conjures up itchy straw, june bugs, and boys in clanking trucks, and I love the poem’s bittersweet acknowledgement of memory’s nature: impossibly real, then gone again. 

Langlois is a teacher from Portland. Her collection “Bright Glint Gone” won the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance chapbook award. Her work has appeared in Leon Literary Review, Rust + Moth, Rogue Agent, and the Best New Poets Anthology. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, indigenous writers, LGBTQ+ writers, and other underrepresented voices. Submit your credits at mainewriters.org/deep-water

Sometimes memory is a splinter working
its way out. I drive by a field of corn stubble
and my skin itches, suddenly lost in an afternoon
spent in a friend’s barn, jumping from the loft
into a pile of half-baled hay until the straw
in our underwear sent us to the muddy pond
to rinse away the sweat and itch of summer.

The only other creatures in the barn that day
were pigeons roosting in the rafters
and mice darting across the packed dirt floor.
Wasps hung in the air, their bodies shiny
and lethal, the biggest threat for miles, except for
the local boys flying down the jagged road,
their trucks rattling like a nest of rusty chains.

And this was all just a slow blink ago—the days,
happy-sad, encased in amber light, the hum
of June bugs bumping against the screen, older
brothers appearing for dinner and then
disappearing, living on the other side of
a mysterious line we thought we’d never
be able to cross, no matter how fast we ran.

There was no event to mark this day, to set it
apart from all the others, and this is what seems
sad to me now—how unremarkable I thought it
at the time, like it was a place that would always
be there—somewhere I could go back to, even now.
This is how memory comes—unbidden.
This is how it leaves, without saying goodbye.

– Suzanne Langlois

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “How Memory Comes,” ©2026 by Suzanne Langlois, appears by permission of the author.