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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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