On Not Drowning at a Family Reunion
I learned how much I didn’t want to die at the annual picnic and pool party reunion of my stepfather’s family in Rosedale
people I never saw any other day of the year as if my mother and I were only allowed to dip our toes into the shallow end
of lives of cousins who looked alike, drank Pabst and Nehi grape out of a cooler, and kids who cut their bare feet on the pull tabs
and banged screen doors and tracked blood on the linoleum and orange shag rug and spilled iodine on the bathmat
because nobody made them wear shoes and nobody noticed which cans the kids grabbed from the cooler or who was holding the baby
and when my mother in the sailor two-piece that she never got wet because of her hairdo laughed like I’d never heard her laugh anywhere else
and turned her back on me, I waded toward the deep and away from the belly flops and cannonballs of my stepfather and the cousins I couldn’t name
until the bottom dropped and the water pulled me under and I fought, fought my way back through a pool full of cousins and drunks
into any depth that wouldn’t drown me while adults I didn’t know or love watched from lawn chairs, eating hot dogs, and I knew
I could hold my breath through any reunions my stepfather drove us to in Rosedale, knew I would burst free, gasping, into breathable air.
I Wanted to Ride to Work in the Back of a Pickup Truck
like you and I wanted to be a bricklayer like you
and swing a red Playmate cooler with a tuna sandwich and two cans of Coors onto the truck bed, hop in, and slam the tailgate closed
and have mortar in my hair and on my pants and know that nobody in the truck gives a damn because nobody looks any better
I wanted to sit with my legs spread on a rusted bed of burger wrappers and Craftsman toolboxes and trowels and jointers and bags of concrete mix and buckets
and laugh when Jimmy hits the brakes and makes me slam against the cab window and all the bricklayers laugh along with me and we’re all happy as a pig in mud
But I rode the MTA bus every day, for an hour and a half each way with every window shut and usually some old man nodding off on the padded shoulder of my pantsuit jacket
his nose in my neck, getting a good whiff of my Avon roll-on and with every hard turn, usually some man mashing me hard onto the side of the bus and that closed window
And there was that drunk who sat on the lap of a girl about my age a receptionist, typist, transcriptionist, assistant to somebody probably a girl who sits in place, legs closed
If I had had your red Playmate then, I would have swung it upside his head, sent him flying across Greenmount Avenue like something you’d do when you were drinking, and sometimes when you weren’t
With every turn of that bus, I wanted to flick cigarette ashes and throw cups and wrappers out an open window
and yell fuck you and give everyone in the cars below the finger and laugh so hard I almost piss myself
like a bricklayer rolling around a truck bed on a Friday afternoon like you
Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of journals, including Quiddity, Potomac Review (Best of the 50), Measure, Little Patuxent Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Gargoyle, Superstition Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Atticus Review, The MacGuffin, The Shore, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Raleigh Review, Allium, and Five South. Also a poem in The TELEPHONE Project.