My mother makes friends with husband-and-wife dance instructors, and stays friends for 25 years until a falling out with the wife who two years later is dead of a brain tumor, but when I’m thirteen they have a pool and a hot tub, and I go over with my mother where sunshine abounds, where they’ve never had any kids of their own, and at thirteen it’s glamour to be allowed in the hot tub by myself thinking of girls at school and of doing things with them that my father did with another woman, living it up, the way my mother now lives it up out dancing at clubs, comes home smelling of smoke, dates a series of men for a month each, or goes to her friends’ pool, where she never swims, not because she doesn’t want to, but because she can’t.

Andy Fogle has six chapbooks of poetry and a full-length, Across from Now, forthcoming from Grayson Books. Other poems, co-translations, and various non-fiction have appeared in Blackbird, Best New Poets 2018, Gargoyle, Image, Mid-American Review, Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and elsewhere.

Photo by gaspar manuel zaldo (cropped)

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