Saint Julian Press

Leslie Contreras Schwartz ~ Poet

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THE SWIM TO ANTARCTICA

 

After Lynne Cox

 

Before the swim, in twenty-two degree waters,

the crew practices her death, then a revival.

 

She picks out landmarks jutting from the water that look

   molten,

remembers how the kelp and barnacles held her body in south

   Argentine waters.

 

Then she is submerged in the freezing water, head under against

   her will.

Her body gasps for air, a tight pocket to hold in her body, a

   single draw --

 

Thirty years of swimming to fight for a single breath now.

She paddles, she argues with her body as it says No, not ever ––

 

and goes faster, harder, plainer. Single strokes make their way

   past icebergs

as they scrape her body like glass shards, and in her mind she

   places these shards

 

in the core of herself, breaks them down into heat and suggestion

   and sound,

in the pitch of her own voice breaking through to say what she

   always

wanted to say to the body:

 

you are owned, not owner. Her mind fights the sensations

of deep cold and wet and ice, her fingers and toes blooming.

 

She remembers the story of the leopard seal skinning a penguin

and the rising memory of survival nods like the brash ice

   around her.

 

 

 

 

FUEGO by Leslie Contreras Schwartz © 2016

ISBN:  978-0-9965231-5-8

SAINT JULIAN PRESS

 

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