poetry selection

Pool

Changing in the locker room
everything is exposed. Like accidental
photographs, wet images emerge
from the chemical-smelling waters:

Rolls of pale flesh, pendulum
breasts, flat nipples on a young
chest like two bullseyes. Pale moths
of thinning gray thatching a crotch, Caesarean
scar, legs hair-flocked, a snake tattooed
on a pregnant woman’s thigh.

Here among the lockers
everyone’s private fist-held I
 is stirred into dissolve

Like out in the pool
where the delicate molecules
of each mouth’s spittle
float finally over all our chlorined tongues.

-- Sarah Pemberton Strong