Generations of us did not migrate to bluer places
to remain dry on the shore. We love summer in spite
of itself; we love the water unconditionally.
Before Post-It notes and mobile phones, my grandmother
gathered her children, found eight swimsuits, watched eight heads bob
where eight pairs of feet couldn’t touch the bottom.
All my aunts and uncles grew to have minivans, my parents too,
a suburban spaceship we piled into, its curved walls
relief from the uncountable elbows of extended family.
Everyone’s temperament was better by the water, eyes closed to waves
hitting the sand. Early June, and our arms blue as we stumbled out.
Summer a coat of zinc oxide, or else a back of blisters.
In my family, everyone burns. Everyone has fallen asleep in the sun.
Before water resistant sunscreen, my mother would wear
her father’s shirts, and on her child frame the sleeves
slumped all the way to her elbows—excess fabric ballooning as
she moved underwater, a cotton jellyfish with cotton tethers, pressing
her body deeper until she dragged against the sand.
When I was little, she pulled me into her lap to show me her forearm,
a constellation of freckles, layered upon each other like sediment.
Countless points of light that traveled through space just to touch her;
“skin damage,” she said. To save me, she showed special attention:
entire handfuls of sunscreen on my frame. As the months faded
to August, she monitored the density of my freckles.
So I learned all the sun’s hiding places—the top of my feet,
the back of my knees. Trying to curb the endless damage
of swimming for hours in high summer, I painted myself in lotion.
After exposure: my mother searched the tops of my cheeks for carelessness.
An excuse: my pruned fingers are an evolutionary adaptation.
They allow me to grip my slippery surroundings,
this trait that has passed through generation after generation,
until it came to me swimming along the bottom of a lake,
without want or need for the shore. An excuse: I could never fall
asleep in the sun. On the playgrounds where I learned four square,
I swore I felt my skin burning. Ants piled under the focused light
of a boy’s magnifying glass, flipped onto their backs, and I watched them
curl as I sit on damp ground tangled in tree roots, cool air that tastes
different. Countless points of light through reflection and refraction—
I watched them off the glass, and they flashed white as sun off waves.
Clara Trippe is a Midwest poet who has relocated to the East Coast and is organizing with feminist anti-war group CODEPINK. Her work has been featured in The Shallow Ends, Rust + Moth, Glass Poetry Press’ Poets Resist feature, and Paperbark Literary Magazine. Clara is a lover of queer theory and freshwater. You can follow her on Instagram @clarabelless and on Twitter at @mid_west_dad.
Photo by Elena Kalis on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND