Articles & Essays   Book Reviews Creative Writing

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Volume 18 Number 2, August 2017

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Anne Babson

TWO WAYS TO SWIM

The pool’s jets spouted chlorine and hummed.

The lanes stretched neat, marked with their plastic beads.

She dove and swam back when siren sounded.

She had leapt off before the gun was fired.

The ocean is the placenta to her fetus

Self, the thing she is becoming, her vestigial

Legs returning to full use, unlike the whalebone

Vestigial legs – she will climb out still, she muses.

 

She was poolside again between work shifts.

Her eyes still burned from that last plunge within.

The stroke she did was called the crawl, so apt

In its naming, so like her job, her life.

At night she buries her car keys in the sand near

The lifeguard chair, and she wades in waist-high at first,

Then she lets the waves of acrid afterbirth slake

Her mouth, her face, her hair.  There is no end to this.

 

The club’s sign said she must wear that skull cap,

Mass-made of pinching latex, and it tugged

When she accelerated, twisted, stroked

Another lap, the same one as before.

Last weekend, she went swimming after a typhoon.

She passed the carcass of a dead terrier washed

Ashore, the flotsam of Rimbaud’s bâteau ivre,

Too, but she had to go in.  Yes, she just had to.

 

Florescent-lit, the turquoise alley yawned.

It was so bored.  Each swimmer was the same.

The filter captured every snarl of lint.

The bodies all got bleached with toxic soup.

In the swell, a school of jellyfish wove around

Her, the stinging kind that look like gardenias

Fallen into the brine. She scissored through bouquets

Of them in crisis – the storm – she got through unstung.

 

The lockers got emptied when they closed, but

They never held anything of value.

The swimmers don’t own what really matters

At any private pool, not what matters.

The ocean cradles her on her back.  The seaweed

Brushes against her legs.  The waves pull her yet closer.

She is a message without a bottle to cork

Her full elocution.  Which barge will pick  her up?


 
 

TAKING ATTENDANCE

 

I am, for all intents and purposes,

A mother now to children in this room.

Between the bells and with the school’s nurses,

I am the weaver at the kente loom.

“Rolique, Quaivon, Rahdel, Shanell, Rae Kwon,

Kiara and Ayisha,” the names chant

Out from a neighborhood unlike my own.

I, white woman, have one syllable’s scant

Length, an article, just barely a name

At all.  What can I bring to them, with such

A curt self-calling, with such thin-lipped fame?

Named after Christ’s mother’s mother, a much-

Needed carer for an unseen father’s

Offspring, I am sent again and marked “there.”