Pool

and she had what she wanted or the shape of it

her crowded cotton skirt scraping

the pool lip we were far from and spat

the water into little wakes that reached her

soft and unknowing like breeze

troubling a window half open

and as our lunch she sliced

for the girls an apple and held the slabs

rocking on her fingers nervous quarter moons out

for us to come towards who were peeling

slipping through the lane in pink bikini

pieces she picked and tied me into

her crinoline hem her pink toes

skirted the wavering surface girls

who were her nervous pink metronome

kickflipping to and fro for thirty laps talking

water from their mouths

Play

Two doors upstage with plastic
windows, backed by paintings
of outside: frenetic strokes of grass
and a path, disappearing. As time passed,

the house flattened
under repeated rules of light.
To signal useful thinking, lamps

in the rafters would flick on and off.
You could apprehend the change
from the audience if you adjusted
the angle of your head.

Nothing difficult was being
put into words. And so people remained
within their thick blue outlines. I was very

at sea. The sister I thought
was the mother spent her time hovering
by the landline, winding its red
knotted cord around her wrist.

When her brother entered through
the larger door, she would nestle the receiver
against her shoulder and say
“What now?”

The invisible dog breezing
through the room was a moving part.
The baby, a stuffed Ziploc bag
inside a fraying piece of quilt.

During intermission, the walls changed
their striped shirts.

It was fair to assume this all took place
in Ohio, just as it was fair to assume,
as opposed to a ghost, a person was just
a person.

When the real mother arrived, she spoke
for a long time about being young
and living, drug-addled, on a houseboat
in Corfu.

How do you know which part
is the main one? I guess,
like someone warm turning over next to you
in bed, it reaches you.

Caitlyn Klum’s poems appear in LARB Quarterly, American Chordata, Second Factory, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, she is currently a PhD student in English and Literary Arts (Poetry) at the University of Denver.