Summer days spent at the subdivision swimming pool I rode my bike to, past
the lime green hills of a newly-made golf course.
Sharks and Minnows in the deep-end, I’d stand at the edge, calculate my route,
splash in. Dive way down to touch victory—the smooth tile of the other side.
I wrestled against boys in Keep Away, sailing a purple Nerf ball across the aqua
(You had to soak first to throw farther out).
My navy blue bathing suit, white stars and red trim, I picked from a Sears catalogue.
(Too many thoughts of swimsuits, mine and other girls, how I measured up.)
Jimmy practiced backflips and jackknives off the high board. We believed
he’d get good enough to enter the Olympics; he paid such attention to it.
Once, the lifeguards planned a nighttime pool party, casting scores of goldfish,
dots of yellow into the water—racing and flickering.
They held a contest for us to catch as many as we could, cup the little creatures
into plastic bags, tied off to carry home.
That feeling of taking a shower after being in water all day. A lingering smell
of chlorine and strawberry-scented shampoo.
The point I learned to hold my breath and swim two times the length, I almost
passed out after my head started pounding. I knew how easy it would be
to drown—just falling asleep, letting the water fill my lungs like humid air.
Whenever it got dark, Mary Ann and I pretended to be mermaids. Together,
separate in the hazy, underwater silence—the pool lights turning into moons.
[An earlier version of this poem was originally published in The Music of the Aztecs.]
Jan Claire Starkey has had poems published in Drawn to the Light, Moonstone Arts, Not The Time to Be Silent, Long Poem Magazine, and The Music of the Aztecs, an anthology celebrating eight Washington, D.C. poets. https://janclairestarkey.wordpress.com