Leigh Camacho Rourks
SWIM, IT SAID
—For Elizabeth Joy Levinson and all the Ocean Girls
When I was a child, my heart beat unfettered
untopped, uncaged, my body bronzed and bleached, unshirted,
unencumbered, unashamed. I was an ocean girl, a swimmer, unsexed
and unafraid. I knew the smell of salt on skin as washed and clean, flesh un
interrupted, unburdened, unspooled, atoms free
to roam and return, to sail, unassailed.
My heart is still hot and gritted. Sand, like love or pain, gets everywhere. Even
in deep chambers, it sits and calls to the sun and the ocean, refuses to wash
free. It is glass unborn, unafraid of reflection. Unrefracted, yet. Direction always
seaward, unwavering, the blood of an ocean girl.
Yesterday, my heart stopped beating
or I stopped beating it down. It grew fins and flashed, glinting
sunward. And I bared my breast, my chest, my ribs, my scaled skin, keratosis—
the doctor said, “Do you sunbathe topless?” and I said no, not knowing why I’d
become topped. The skin there thickened anyway, and my heart knew this change
was no disease, I am a fish thing it screamed,
Its silvered dorsal sharp against sternum.
And it escaped. It is always escaping me, now that I sit so still, suited
and well suited for a life off an island, unfreckled toes, heals uncalloused
and unscathed, unmade. This skin thinned and rippling longing,
as if need is a thing with gentle mass, weight sufficient to skip slip
shift, to slide, to tear, to rip and leave hole enough
to swim.