Marybeth Rua-Larsen
Not Swimming but Floating
How elegant his strokes, the butterfly,
the freestyle, trudgen, where swimming on his side
and scissor kicks propel him forward, but I
prefer to float, my body buoyed for a ride
to nowhere, where staring at a rippled sky
and watching all its iterations pairs
simplicity with magic- a puffy walleye
morphs into a crooked flight of stairs.
It's even better when my eyes are closed:
you teaching me to dig for clams will drift
to catching minnows with our hands, transposed,
again, with memories that rise and shift,
and it's the only way we bottle thunder,
a moment's breath before we're pulled back under.
Bio
Marybeth Rua-Larsen lives in Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Lily Poetry Review, Magma, and Crannóg, among others. She won the Luso-American Fellowship for the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and was a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland. Her chapbook Nothing In-Between is available from Barefoot Muse Press.