- I hate the smell of bleach on skin.
- I almost cannot swim in pools for the chlorine.
- I much prefer the smoothly rippling river,
- Where you must watch for fishhooks and the men come around twice a day
- To empty the nets. I like to ride the waves their boats make.
- Even more, I love to float in limbo, quiet, and hearing my own breathing.
- It is deep, and I can trace it.
- I follow it, in through my nose, my chest expands, my diaphragm drops,
- Down my windpipe, spilling into the bronchi, then into vessels
- Full of blood and oxygen, and mixing with sugars.
- Shivers bolt through me like liquid ice in my veins.
- It is the breathing of a person
- Who is ignoring that their temperature is slowly dropping.
- My feet are numb, five feet below the water, in the center of the river
- That runs down from the mountain.
- I hang suspended, sharing a womb with more creatures than I can count.
- I listen to the tinkling, swishing, chirping noise that Nature makes.
- There is life around me, and I am life, I am the very essence of life.
- Bleach kills. But I like to feel the cool slide of fish on my legs
- And watch the tiny shelled creatures draw their lines in the sand.
- I sink lower and feel the biting coldness against my eyelids,
- And I breathe out, out, out
- Thinking, what I don’t like about bleach isn’t actually the smell on skin,
- It’s how it takes away one’s own smell.
- I like the way I smell. I smell like clean, salty air, like a sea breeze,
- And I smell of the warm, spicy smell that women have.
- It says,
- I am here, and I play, and I breathe, and I love, and I work, and I write,
- And I swim, and I sweat, and I laugh and I sigh and I am alive.
- I have the desire for life that some have for lovers.
- I live enough for the little ones who can never be of me,
- And I am happy now, even carrying that.
aug 11 2010 ∞
aug 11 2010 +