Winter Swimming
by Kelly Rowe
The old man who lives alone returns from the sea
where the ice is breaking up, stepping in bare feet
through the snow, all that illuminates a sunless afternoon.
An ugly man, he throws his shoulders back, raises
a pocked face and pink puffy breasts as if unwrapping
a bouquet of tulips in a warm room so they can breathe.
At the edge of the deep end the teacher braiding
the dark girl’s hair jerks
back her head, the girl cries out—her eyes meet
the old man’s gaze and he nods, yes, he can see she too
was dreaming of swimming out under the frozen surface
of the sea, out through all the small islands, out past Åland,
of becoming a starfish, jellyfish, abalone, a part of all
the waving silent life beneath the ice. And she?
Could swear the old man speaks her own spare dialect
of the unlovely, the unloved, that he too is an angler fish,
who lives deep, who carries his own lantern through
the bright gardens blooming in the fathomless murk.
Kelly Rowe’s debut collection, Rise Above the River (2023) won the Able Muse Book Award and was a finalist for the Arizona Book Award for Poetry. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Child Bed Fever (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022) and Flying South on the Back of a Dove (Texas Review Press, 2019). She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona where she works as a volunteer immigration attorney, representing undocumented women.