
The Deep End, Rewind by Marietta Brill
Just the other night
when a friend asked me Did that really happen I said, I think so
When I was about 9
lawn chairs goggles ketchup packets towels soggy paperbacks suntan oil twisted up into the sky
But that was after
a waterspout flung a spoke of drops onto the surface of the pool
Before that
the adults gathered around my mother
Before that
the waterspout lifted into the air and seemed to disappear, but without my mother
Before that
my mother spun across the surface of the pool seemingly alone
All the while
my left hand drifting in the pool so I could feel its currents
A few minutes before that
a vortex touched down in the deep end, drilled into the pool and with its cone-force caught my mother for a whirl
Throughout
it was completely silent, which seems odd in retrospect
In my memory of this event I remember having another memory
of once or twice my mother and father waltzing across the linoleum in a dance that would settle
our hearts, but was just the calm eye of a storm always brewing or crashing between the walls
Embedded in that memory, like a Russian doll memory, I remember having another memory
of the comforting sound of my parents talking in another room, then knives and forks clanging, and
the image of devil tails which could’ve been the memory of a cartoon I once saw, resurfacing as I edged toward sleep
In general
my mother was at the epicenter of chaos and fun, sometimes its actual source, so the squall choosing her
was no surprise as it was her Familiar, greedy to feed from another force born of extreme pressures
All the while
a leaf, a band aid, and a twist tie lapped in and out of the filter
Just before the vortex
like a team, the bathing-capped mothers slipped into the waters, bobbing in the shallows or clotted
around the edges in small groups, smoking and flutter-kicking
Almost simultaneously
the men, sheepish in baggy trunks and back hair, sliced through the surface, linear and solitary, silvery bullet streaks, inaudible
All the while
dripping and pressed hard to musty hot cement, we panted, desperate for the sharp whistle to sound again
Minutes before all this, foreshadowing, in descending order, I think:
the pool greyed and bristled from gusts of wind and so did our forearms
the sun suddenly stopped blazing
the tall oaks fretted
Possibly
the oaks fretted after the pool greyed and bristled
Alternatively, or as an additional memory
the oaks were fretting all the while
Marietta Brill’s poems and reviews have appeared in Wildness, THRUSH Poetry Journal, DIALOGIST, Radar Poetry, hyperallergic.com, The Adirondack Review, The Rumpus, About Place Journal, and others. Her poems were selected by Mark Doty for first prize in the Brooklyn Poets Walt Whitman Bicentennial Poetry Contest (2019), and by Khadijah Queen as a finalist in the Inverted Syntax Sublingua Contest (2020), and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. She lives with her family in New York’s Catskill Mountains.
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