WILLIAM FARGASON, FEATURED IN THE nEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW

Waterline

as a child      my mother would make me
go back inside      to check
her curling iron      to see if it was still
on      I would trace      the cord      from handle
to prong      like I was reading a story
reading each line      over and then over again
to find the meaning      as a child

my mother      wouldn’t let me
shower during      a thunderstorm
she said      a bolt could hit      the waterline
and it’d travel out      the showerhead
into my bones      like in Tom and Jerry
when Tom is struck      the blue
around his body flashing      his bones
off and on      and now as an adult      I check

the stove      three times before leaving
always in a pattern      so now I think of
my mother as I unplug my toaster      coffeepot
electric kettle      anything heat-producing
anything that could      catch fire must stay off
I check it three times      in sets of three
before I leave my apartment      or go to bed
I speak it aloud      until I’m convinced
that is off      that is off      that is      off

just like I learned years ago     a current
of electricity     a jolt of panic
through my arms     I now have medication
for that     a switch I try to turn off    even
though the breaker box     is waiting
the powerlines     in the distance
my mother’s arms     above me

William Fargason on “Waterline”:

I think much of my OCD is a learned behavior as much as it is a genetic one. I wanted to capture how anxiety can be imprinted on a child from a parent, especially for unmedicated parents who seek out neither therapy nor medication. This happens even from caring parents with good intentions, such as my mother. The form of this poem breaks syntactic phrases apart from their mooring, mimicking how the routines of OCD are often not tied to any rational form of reality.

William Fargason is the author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, 2020). His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University. He is a poetry editor at Split Lip Magazine. He lives with himself in Sparks Glencoe, Maryland. Read more at www.williamfargason.com