Excerpt

To Swim Daily

is to wing one’s way forward,
with each breath, to part water,
wave water behind.

My mother stood facing me
with outstretched hands, wading
backwards as I breathed my way toward her.
Waves bent light into tentacles on sand.
Her underwater body loomed large.

A refugee at six, my mother left no wake
from her boat for lovers or me to follow.
Where did she cross the divide
between Communist and colonial?
Not a porous line on a map,
but a solid wall of fear.

The summer after she landed,
she ran alone into the sea,
past the red flag on the beach.
The storm claimed her inflatable ring.
A stranger swept her ashore.
At the beach house, no one asked
if the girl who left was the wet one
who returned, or what she gave to the sea.

My mother once told me this story:
two lovers, champion swimmers
escaping the mainland,
cast farewells into the sea.
The man lagged.
The woman continued.

There are walls in the sea.
In the undertow of history,
we swim parallel to shore,
till the sea itself is tired.