You want to speak plainly. To unbutton, unzipper. To step out of one pant hole & then the other. Your words without pockets or pleats. But you hoped it would sound different. You are tired. You have been tired for on & on & you’re not sure how to make it mean something. You’re jealous of people who sound like who they are. You want to sound like that too. If you knew what you weren’t ready to say, you’d say that. You dive into the pond. Someone lends you fruit inflatables & you fall naked off pineapples & large pitless peaches. You float without a shell. After, you sit still naked with friends, not yet having solved whatever you each don’t like about yourself. Everyone on that ice-smoothed rock believes everyone else is perfect, just not them. Maybe you want beauty or a new form. To unleash something. Maybe a body doesn’t need to be solved. Maybe this is it, how the sun feels everywhere, how you’re never surface-to-surface so completely as in the water, the pond up every nerve. The way you talk to each other, after, skin still wet. The warm wind. Thoughts thawing into smaller & smaller kernels, from worthy to brave to here.
Note: Excerpt from “The Garbage Poems.” All words in the poem (with the exception of title) transcribed from garbage found at Punch Bowl Pond, St. John’s, NL.
Bios
Anna Swanson
Anna Swanson (she/her) is a writer and librarian living in St. John’s, NL/ Ktaqmkuk. Her writing is interested in themes of chronic illness, concussion, embodiment, identity, queerness, garbage, and survival joy. Her first book of poetry, The Nights Also (Tightrope Books, 2010), won the Gerald Lampert Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Her writing has appeared in various anthologies including In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, The Best Canadian Poetry in English, and Impact: Women Writing After Concussion. She also works with Riddle Fence as a poetry editor, and loves swimming outdoors in all seasons. For more about the Garbage Poems project, see: https://www.garbagepoems.com/. [provided with the poem “Maybe a Body”]