Yasmin Kloth

IF MY MEMORY WERE A RIVER [1]

I would not jump whole body from
its stone washed shores—
Instead, I’d step toe by toe
in the way I stand at the ladder’s edge
of a pool in summer.
My mother was the one who caught
me drowning, a steady, strong swimmer sinking
and my mother, her white linen a skin
on her skin holding me beneath my armpits
until we broke the surface with our bodies
and we reached for the concrete edge—
my mother’s hands first, then my own.

My memory is a river
not the Nile where my family’s stories
silted the banks through orange desert,
but the Litani—ancient and dark, curves
cutting rocks in the mountains
where my framed family tree says
this is where your people really are from.

If my memory is a river,
it’s my mother first, holding sticks
and kindling through a half circle formed
from shoulder to the hip.
What of the rest of us she tried
to gently carry, a basket of fractured bones
sloughing in the way a bird
loses a part of itself when it flies,
a fragment and a feather landing lightly
and despite best efforts at retrieval
sometimes lost.

[1] “You can’t step in the same river twice. I think it’s the same thing with memory, that you can’t exactly recall the exact same memory twice.” Steve Ramirez, an associate professor of psychology and brain sciences at Boston University, Science Friday, November 14, 2025

back to contents

prev
next