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I might just have to drown you children
I might just drown us all.
No, my brother and I said. We were blonde
and forceful then, planning
on snack, children of our own, the beach.
My mother’s face was voile in
those days. Florida was green felt
and eggshells, fingernails and rind.
Hurricanes were relaxing to me.
I thought of them as marriages.
My body was a swizzle stick. My mind a
rainy crash. You children eat a lot.
You are eating me
out of house and home. My mother’s
chin was a goose. She smelled like
sweat. I pretended to be a baby when
she wasn’t around. I dispersed myself
when she was. Don’t ever let me hear
you say the word God, she said.
Now, she is quiet and old and fluid like a conch.
She looks out upon the bottomless
Lake Underhill in Orlando, a gray lake
refusing to reflect the sky, a pale water
that shadows what’s to come. Most of the
time she doesn’t remember or invent.
You two were never spanked, she says now.
I’m still falling. But I do not think in opposites.
I always knew better than that, not that.
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