MIDDLE

Yasmin Kloth

It must be at 40 when things fall apart, 
that’s what I think as we flatten Ohio 
on our way out, an arrow for Burning Springs 
passing in a blur on our left in the state next door, 
letters tilted at an angle on a small white sign. 
It’s my friends I’m worried about most, their marriages 
or their health somewhere in the middle, uncertain 
in the way my daughter asks if we’ve reached the middle 
of our drive. If the middle of West Virginia is a curve 
of gray pavement through the mountains, then the tall, 
thin trees are our markers and we’ll get lost 
finding our way East. Is it our biology that changes first, 
or our minds? Cells with inverted lining like a sweater peeled 
up from the waist, a signal we’re starting over now 
from the long line of our life before. I don’t pretend 
to know the roads here and I dream of bumbling 
in the dark where a cold summer cloud has parked
itself on a hill. Maybe I was supposed to see it sooner,  
my friends blistering like new asphalt, and I'm ill-prepared for their heartache 
in the way my daughter struggled on a rented bike 
too large for her body, grabbed her hand brakes with a strain 
that pulled first from her shoulders then tightened 
through her mouth. Ripples of tire and dirt, gravel and big rock 
trails, I wondered if any of this was a good idea, 
her small chest rising with her panic, one leg on the pedal, 
the other on the side of the road.        

Yasmin Mariam Kloth writes creative nonfiction and poetry. Her writing, often rooted in her Middle Eastern heritage, scratches at love, loss, place, and space. Yasmin's work has been published in the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, JuxtaProse Literary Review, Chestnut Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, LA Times, and others. Yasmin lives in Cincinnati, OH with her husband and daughter. Her debut collection, Ancestry Unfinished: Poems of a Lost Generation, is an exploration of her family memories and the Middle East.