Swimming
I was afraid of everything.
The Taunton river,
its brackish green stink,
undulating sea grass,
and the bloated arm
of some missing girl
waving to me from chartreuse strands
as I leaned my own bones
over the hot metal railing.
Crashing through the ice
on Sturdivant’s Pond.
The older girls with
their roach clipped feathers
and long leather coats,
fringed suede moccasins
laced to blow-job bruised knees.
The older boys who dug a pit
in the Camp Titicut woods
and the Wampanoag chief
who emerged from the wall
to pass through my body
as I waited at the dark bottom
for someone to lift me out.
Joey Miller who kissed
and told and told of
things that did not happen;
the way I wished
those other things did,
bases traveled, all firsts,
without attention to detail,
only to claim the score.
Melissa pregnant at 14,
not knowing how
to carry a secret abortion.
That Aunt Flo would always
arrive in the seat of white pants
the way she did that one time.
That boys would always prefer
the maybe suicidal girl with
the eating disorder.
That every birthday would
repeat the sweet sixteen
surprise—only one friend came.
That I could not stop
touching myself in the night,
sleep always on the other
side of one more bursting star.
The hope of being touched
by other hands and mouths
and the constant threat
of my mother finding out
anything and everything.
My father’s drunken friends
from his job at the prison
blowing off steam with
rheumy-eyed beer breath
the lid off their brute maleness
the wives clutching car keys.
The released prisoner
who wanted dad to pay a debt
that figured me as interest
standing in a patch of pale light
from the basement door
staring up at my bedroom window.
The idea I’ll never shake
that he is in some way still there.
The grizzled voices of truckers
on the nearby interstate
crackling the tinny speaker
of my walkie-talkie, hey little lady
the hum of their 18 wheels
vibrating closer through the night.
Now my fears are not corporeal.
That I will forget it all,
that no one will remember
my blessing
my apology
my openness
my longing
my bursting stars
that it was only ever a current
skimming over muscle and bone
into the same green oblivion.
