Andy Fogle

The Turning Room

She has discovered her husband
is cheating, and which complex
of townhouses, so drives
until she finds parked on the street
his silver truck, upon which she scrawls
profanities with lipstick,
and strides to the storm door.

Inside, they laugh and drink wine.
“Not a care in the world,”
she’ll later tell me. She knocks
on the glass, asks the woman
if she is Julie Logan.
There must be some kind
of eclipse happening behind

my father’s face, and Julie
says, “I am.” My mother
replies, “I just wanted
to see what you looked like.”
She turns and drives off, windows up,
screams and weeps with a wound that will take
33 years to kill her.

A Photography in Philadelphia

Rooftop wedged among rooftops
in a cragged-out downtown uprising
of the city’s blocked-in insides.

Dominating the center of the frame,
a large pot of morning light
maiden grass, its green blades white
at the margins and midveins,

shimmering silver, and behind those swirls:
the beige luxury highrise,
decades-old TV antennae

like pulse rate charts, mute orchestra
of ventilation pipes, empire
after empire of brick and plaster.
Between the roof deck’s spindles, the red light

at the corner of 6th and Christian.
Not far, the bar Bird used to frequent
when the Celtics were in town.

My wife and three-year-old son
in a hammock, mouths lolled open
at nothing but dusk-sky. Maybe jets

overhead, the tumbling wash of sound
silencing the lives of my lives.
Her hand is on his knee; my ring
is on her finger. There is wonder

in one face, and fear in another.
A foot away, our friend’s son
on a tiny picnic table, his hair

a ragged black explosion.
His mind is on the book he’ll make me read,
and my finger’s just released the button
to snatch this moment from the blurry now

and make it a back then, give it edges,
define a foreground and background, sentence
my eyes and mind to years of wandering.

Andy Fogle is the author of Across from Now and seven chapbooks of poetry, including the forthcoming Arc & Seam: Poems of Farouk Goweda, co-translated with Walid Abdallah. He’s from Virginia Beach and the DC area, and now lives in upstate NY, where he teaches high school. Music, collage, and poetry can be found at fogle.bandcamp.com