Mother Countries
to love the complicated place and the complications
of its people: my angel
on the riverbank is the braid of family
& America, but it isn’t fair: my mother is no country
and this country is no mother: I am son of one
citizen of the other
*
she is dead but I am still M
her son at the end of her being
alive I became her
caretaker: since she’s dead I am
no longer that America I’ll
die before you and the mask
of my citizenship will dissolve
like salt in hot water
*
She caught a dangerous lyric in my high school stereo::
What did he say? I don’t want you listening to that stuff.
She picked up The Communist Manifesto from my bed:
Why are you reading this?
“Ben lent it to me.”
Is he the one who picked you up in a dress?
*
Her voicemail begins, Call me when you get this.
Her hands dealt compulsive solitaire, watching the Weather Channel.
We urged her, Forgive.
She shook her head, Forget it.
*
As she died for a week
in September, I wept less and less.
After holding
her pulseless wrist for ten minutes,
her body
wasn’t her anymore.
It never was.
My body was once her body, but hers was never
mine, and then we severed
on a day we celebrated. We could only own
so much past.
The Swimming Lesson
The story goes that my mother was twelve and the instructor just pushed her into the lake, saying, Swim. Her growing body tangled in brush, weeds, her future, branches, bitterness, betrayal, race, roots, and fantasy, and someone dove in to save her.
She never learned to swim, readily admitted her fear of water, and blamed that instructor as long as she lived. She’d go into the ocean or a lake up to her knees, a pool up to her shoulders, feet always touching the submerged ground, head above water. Her face and hair were to remain dry.
As she died, she didn’t know where she wanted to rest. It was so hard to just be—wouldn’t just-being eternally with non-being be harder? She didn’t want to rest beside her parents and stepmother, didn’t want to be buried at all, said she’d never really wanted the fire, but now felt it her best option.
I listed places to be scattered, and she shook her head at every one. She was just done.
I told her she could stay with me, and she does, but today I imagined finding a lake, how I could strip down and then scatter her ashes—with its bits of bone and teeth—and then jump in as it swirled, hopefully glittering in the sunlight, the unwanted fire cooled at last, and lie on my back, look at the sky, reach behind my head to pull the water past my hip, finally swimming with my mother.
Andy Fogle is the author of Across from Now and seven chapbooks of poetry, including Arc & Seam: Poems of Farouk Goweda, co-translated with Walid Abdallah. He’s from Virginia Beach, spent years in the DC area, and now lives with his family in upstate NY, teaching high school. www.foglejunk.squarespace.com