The blue water in the pool
Is it really blue?green?grey?
My eyes are deceiving me
The deceiving pool
Is mocking my courage as
I am standing here
Felling at the top of the world..
Brave myself for my first Olympic swim
At the corner of the poolside
Absolutely my beautiful, courageous,
and most of all, honest coach,
Who keeps  reminding  me of  this swim of a lifetime
Who consistely tells of my swimming legs, body, hands
An Olympic swimmer you are!!  
She says that all the time,
as if she is planting the words in my head
Fidgeting, I First test the water with my toes,
1, 2, 3... a silent prayer to Almighty..
Let’s take a shot!  
finally I take the plunge,
Completely submerging while holding my breath,
Eventually, we all fall or dive into the unknown,
Sometimes fully prepared,
sometimes unsure,
Always compelled...
Submerging for few seconds..
I have stopped to think..
Force myself to emerge
catching my breath again...
Heard a whistle and a clap
Bravo! You made it champion!
My coach smiled...
made her proud!
OLYMPIC  2016 Brazil here I come...

Waves surround us
cradle our new bodies
in warm currents
bring us to foreign shores
deliver us to a waiting world

We learn to swim
soon our feet touch the floor
we look and judge the ocean
making our own waves
and our waves make more

In time the waves recede
carrying those who need to leave
resting their minds
washing the beaches clean
for new waves to find

Through choking depths of unseen sights
Turns a fabled fish mid swim
And he feasts on any beast he likes
Does the mighty briny king
Forgotten to the world of men
Just a story on the lips
Of fishing folk that love to send
A shiver through the ships.

This little guy is pretty chill
He lives on top an icy hill.
He can go sledding on his belly
Without turning into jelly
After he crashes and smashes
Into igloos or leaves gashes
In some poor eskimo’s ice
Sculpture that used to be very nice.

He can have epic snowball fights
When the polar bears don’t bites
And the seals decide to join in
On the fun and they all grin
With excitement and wonder.
He can also go under
Water and swim with the whales
Or slide down their massive tails

In short, for that is what a penguin
Truly is, not to mention
Cute, pudgy, and the coolest
Animal that lives life to the fullest

half a dead pigeon
has indented itself in the gravel lot next door
and every day at dusk, when i run my sacred shower,
(with the lights off and windows open
and otis redding echoing through the empty house)
i have to watch the black static tide of flies
swim around one of it's upward bent wings.

the first time i saw it my jaw dropped and repulsion choked my throat closed-
disturbed by it's total disgrace,
i slammed the window shut
and preferred to gaze at tile grime to pass the time.
but from the days that followed,
i managed to muster up respect
and acknowledged that this
battered half of a bird
was now a variable in my scenery
(praise be to impermanence)

and now
the sunset drowns everything in it's hazy blood orange
and the wind floods the trees and fills the underside of the bridge with sound,
and i stand naked in the warmth,
singing boldly out of key, twisting hot water out of my hair,
as the summer breeze politely invades my privacy.

so i salute the pigeon, say i wish you the best.
and embrace the weight and fullness of my happiness,
and know well i am more than body and voice,
and watch it sink further into the arms of the earth each night.
grateful to know that death doesn't end life.

Beaumaris
a carnival of tones
of damp evenings
of tramway cars
of small orange lights
distracted bystanders
empty bridges
dreamy horizons
Pale was the lace
white the cotton
dress and parasol
almost sepia
Dream of that particular Monet,
unseen
before the rains came

Many years later
I found her
so tenuous
in what little was left
yet there she was
all new shades
of melancholy

Now I just swim
every now and then
in that blue ocean
of her blueness,
the Sea of Oblivion
where no one coughs
where she lives, again,
forever
in the glimpse of
bright reflections of sunshine
on the water
of a country
where it never rains

It must be hard to have me as your older sister.
It must be.
I call your cute little jokes "lame",
and ignore you when you tell me about your fantastic school day.
I refuse to hug you to sleep at night
even if you're afraid of the darkness that could swallow you up anytime.
I order you to do things around and you do them but
when you ask me to do things, I don't.
You try to get me to stop paying attention to my phone and
start paying attention to your piano pieces.
You try to get me to stop lying around all day and
start going to swim with you.
You ask me all the time:
"Can you go swimming with me?"
I always reply:
"No, I've got work/I'm lazy/. Go swim yourself."
And I don't understand that when you keep calling your friend over
it's because you feel lonely
She's the one who listens to you
play with you
talk to you
when I don't.
Well maybe I didn't understand that when I said:
"Why is she coming over again? You guys play like every single day. Do your work."
You try to make me happy by telling me interesting things.
I silence you out when you do that,
popping in my earphones
and you just sit there quietly.
It must be hard to have me as your older sister.

It must be hard to have me as your daughter.
I talk back 99% of the time just to prove I'm right,
because I am so thick-skinned I wouldn't actually admit even if I'm down right
wrong.
I always change my mind the last minute,
leaving you panicking and worrying about what to do.
I treat my younger sister badly, being really mean to her,
I don't understand how we are both precious to you
You don't want to see any of us getting
hurt.
You work so hard for me
I don't come out of my room to say hi to you when you come home
You bought a new wifi network set for me
when I kept complaining that the current set wasn't working
when it was just my fault for using it
too much.
You meticulously worked to come up with a nice study table design for us
I complained that your laptops were taking up too much space
and you moved it away to the living room
where you could only use it while standing.
You didn't say anything about it.
It must be hard to have me as your daughter.

It must be hard to have me as your friend.
I blast at you
and treat you like a punching bag
not being sensitive to your feelings.
I make you worry about me even when I have hurt you.
I tell you what I feel so frankly and
you get hurt.
You tell me you're always there to listen
yet I never listened to you.
You always notice when I'm about to fall down into that deep abyss of the unknown,
yet when you're falling I still can't find a rope to help you up.
You try to watch videos with me and
I move my attention to my phone.
It must be hard to have me as your friend.

milky river...
when did earth decide
to take a swim?

It was just one of those days
when the haze of summer had just started to lull the suburbs
into a sticky heat
of grills and lawn mowers
of air conditioning
(everyone pretended not to use it; windows! barked the mothers, windows!)

and the sweat stuck to the brows
of the life guards
napping in the sun
above an empty pool
the Dawson pool.

No one ever swam there
and the lifeguards knew it
those teenagers, sunning themselves lazily on hot days like this
(and the mothers! They complained about the tans. Cancer! the said.
In a way they were right,
but really.)

The waters were clear but the fences were rusted
the diving boards were falling
throwing themselves off the deep end

Katydids
lawnmowers
those lazy days
and the mothers! the constant nagging of soccer moms
lulled around the pool
on the day
Cassandra
took her
last
swim

Her face was like shoe leather
tanned by no fewer than 98 summers spent on porch swings
plodded slowly,
like  her feet were considering
every
last
step
this woman presented her 5 dollars to the girl at the gate
(some surprised lifeguard, because, you see, no one ever swam in Dawson pool)
and pushed inside.

Cassandra never left her porch.
and the mothers! how they scolded their children for teasing her
(even though they had done the same thing at that age.
That's how old Cassandra was).
Decades of the suburbs
and push mowers
and world wars
stayed like photograph around her face.

The lifeguards stared.
Cassandra kicked off her flip flops and shrugged off her mumu.
In a pink bathing suit she sank into the water.

The age melted off of her as she danced through the water
graceful
strong
the strokes were slow and deliberate
and the lifeguards watched as she pulled herself from one end of the pool to another and back.
She made 16 rings
remembering her childhood
23 more
for her marriage
and then 60
60 rings!
before she stopped.
60 years old, the year her husband died.
The year she had stopped talking
aside from the hushed prayers in church
but she was talking to him; that didn't count.
60 rings.

And Cassandra just disappeared.

No one found the body
no one found anything
aside from flip flops and a mumu.
The lifeguards were nearly scandalized
for letting Cassandra drown
but soon she went from a news story to a ghost
and the mothers! sniped at their children
for whispering
"Did you here about old Ms. Cassandra?
They say she found God."

My thoughts come down like the wave that doesn't leave you standing.
They bark louder than the dog that doesn't sleep.
They repeat like a child playing copy cat.

And I watch you learning to swim,
while the life guard directs you.
He hands you a pair of earplugs and you are off.
Leaving me to drown in your thought.