Keeper by Kasey Jueds

Author:Kasey Jueds [Jueds, Kasey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822979081
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

The Missing Women

The ones on flyers pinned outside

the pool, papers curling in the chlorinated damp

where I'd wait, after practice,

for my mother, wait to be driven

away. The ones I'd study

over and over—names and faces and last seen

wearing, the places they'd disappeared

from. Days my mother came late I couldn't

stop staring, as if by looking hard

their stories would unlock: blue shirt,

bus stop, 1972: I carried them home

then back to the pool, up and down

my narrow lane, the water clear all the way

to the bottom, the slap and reach

of arms and hands—something missing

in me, or something I missed,

as every fall I missed the first leaves

turning, so when I finally remembered

they'd already started letting go,

their vanishing tangling the air.

That season I swam until my fingers puckered,

my still-damp hair, in the parking lot after, stiffened

to clots of ice. I swam and swam and my body

stayed solid, not like the water I knew

it contained. In school we learned how much

of us is liquid, how stories have

a beginning, middle, and an end. I read

of women who turned

to seals in the sea, dove deeper than I could

and came back safe, and I kicked,

turned, pushed away

from the wall, counting laps while the women

knocked inside my head, their weight

buoying me, acolyte of cold,

of split times, lane lines, the secret

history of water. How anyone could slip

from her story like that!—a shape

in paper cut cleanly away. Behind

my shape water sealed

itself shut, somehow I was swimming

into the next day, the next,

into love that seemed sometimes

a desire to be gone, whittled to the thinnest

stem of bone—as those women

might have desired, or not

desired, the ones so lost

by now they must be almost home.

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