Leveler Poetry Journal
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Open Water

 

If blubber could absorb it, if con men could fleece it,
if stand-ins could raze it, if only the government
hadn’t made a black lung out of every exit,
every option.  More hologram
insignia: a passel of bald eagles hovering right
beneath the contrails, their tails at full
salute like a proxy indicator
of irradiance.  You contemplate the difference
between threshold and crossed. Algae
blooms blossom against your wrists. A man yells,
“You shouldn’t be in there!” You used to acclimate
to lake temperature by drawing
a cold bath. Now, pulling through this tepid
soup in January’s wake, air expelled
in gasps, you listen out for the low drone
of bullfrogs breathing through their skin,
immersed chorus of debris, their buried bodies
incrementally rising to the surface. The marker
of a pocked silo helps you sight
the shoreline. You stay
on course, circumscribed and awash
in melon light. You’d rather put on your favorite
A-line dress (the one with Monet’s Garden in Giverny print)
and twirl in a rush of iris, forget
each moment when carbon dioxide meets infrared,
but you don’t. You swim.




Alicia Rebecca Myers