All in by Ruth Hoberman

Valentine’s Day

SWWIM Every Day
by Ruth Hoberman

by Ruth Hoberman


First stop, CVS: cards for the grandkids. Red hearts
like catalpa leaves—is this what love looks like?

Nothing like the maroon mess inside me, with its
twittering valves and worry. Study its dimensions

(breadth, height, depth, by imagined disaster)
and you’ll see anything can happen—husband, dog,

daughter, grandkids crushed (toppling masonry, coyote,
truck)—though mornings, there they are unscathed.

So why still this slip of muskrat through the mind—
brown furred curve surfacing—quick swimmer, gone

but hunkered near? Even in daylight, I feel the hush
and sigh of its breathing. Holstered, ready:

call me the quick-draw master of panic. And here
in my hands two cards: animals holding hearts.

We love you says the unicorn.
We love you says the golden bear.

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Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems and personal essays in (most recently) Salamander, Solstice, Ibbetson Street, and Nixes Mate.


I Think About My Mother's Skeleton

SWWIM Every Day
by Ruth Hoberman

by Ruth Hoberman


We dress up to lay our dead down—so ceremonial,
even though there’s no such thing as buried. Disassembled,
sure—my mother a heap of shards by now, twenty years on—

but hardly underground. Mainly she’s here, a ramshackle
ghost in need of repair. She haunts the hardware store
where my husband sifts through bolts and rings

for customers intent on resurrecting broken things. Everything
fails with time but lingers, waits to reassemble.
Let me tell you what I’m trying to do, customers say.

Let me tell you what I need. And he finds the very thing
that works. The coffee grinder grinds again, the plate’s
undropped—mending being a kind of memory (like words)

a bringing back. Though when I think of all my mother
wanted still to do—how not quite ready she was to die
and how alone (the rest of us a thousand miles away

and not a clue)—I wonder where the bolt for that is,
the hinge, the metal plate to cover up the hole; the screw.

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Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems and essays in such journals as Smartish Pace, RHINO, West Trestle Review, Ibbetson Street, and Ploughshares.