My life

My life 

I keep trying 

to get the level right

for the skimmers to work

it needs to be four 

fingers below the rim

not around 

four but

exactly four, which is 

hard to do when the weather

dips below 

eighty four degrees 

and the water steams up 

toward the sun like

it’s life depends 

on floating 

off the surface of

the pool, as quickly as 

Icarus before

his demise, and 

I turn on the

hose quickly to 

fill back to four

fingers when the steam 

decides to toughen up 

and returns to the pool

with a thunderous 

light show that lands 

two feet from where 

I was treading water, having

clearly 

miscalculated the 

number of seconds 

between explosions

which is

not to say I’m bad 

at math, I am

a strong swimmer and 

I pushed it to the 

rim 

ever since I was eight 

at the Hampstead pool 

when my mother called 

her voice, dark

loud,  “Get outta the 

pool!”, decades 

before the first 

Blackberry 

and then Apple,

it was our turn 

to put in our snack bar

order of hot dogs and

squished kinnishes,

it was my life and I

pleaded for one

more swim,

as if I were a 

mathematician, and 

a swim, a thing that 

could be measured.

Lori Polachek

August 2019