In Which Skinny Dipping Restores a Voice

BY ANNA SWANSON

You have come to speak one-on-one with the world. Not danger exactly,

just that your fire has become harmless, your hope tastes like aspartame

& your thirst cannot remember what it wants. An illustrated book

of hazards & antibodies & small careful passions. Your questions,

plastic toys that make no mark. What is it you want? The world

holds out its world-sized palm filled with water. Leave your bright

packaging on the rock. Make cold contact. Your face, your ribs. Your assembled

damage & cravings. Stay under. Lose your left & your right. Lose your receipts

& your schedules & your adhesive outline. Come back up breathless & breathe. That harmless fire— not yours. You are alive. Your fine fat

facts. Your unsweetened tongue. Speak now like a child who is

also an alligator. Speak your hazards, your hardwood, glass-fibred barbs

& kiln-dried wants. Library of starched passions, impossible flames small

as almonds. Speak the apples of your green-bodied attention

& your unauthorized animal moons. Speak hot & necessary like calories,

like antibodies. Like fire.

Note: All words (with the exception of title) transcribed from garbage found in the Punch Bowl Pond, St. John’s, NL.