For the Swimming Girls

For the Swimming Girls

after Catherine Pierce

We never were mermaids, not when we pretended the wind
making tiny wavelets across the teal pool was the tugging
tide, not when the chlorine water knotted our hair, then dried it
like kelp, later, in the stifling car on the drive home. We never
were mermaids, but we were girls taught to swim at a young

age, our dads holding us perpendicular to the water, then parallel,
then perpendicular again in the YMCA pool before we could walk,
girls raised to know the value of keeping yourself afloat. We were girls
in tie-dye one-piece swimsuits, three and a half sloppy footprints
on the high dive board proving we had been there before we plummeted

off. We were goggles forgotten at home, eyes forced open underwater
diving for the lantern-bright flash of a sinking coin, the whites gone bloodshot
when we checked in the locker room mirror. We never were mermaids,
never were lifeguards or bikinis and magazines on a deck chair, we were
swimsuits outgrown by the end of the summer, sunburn on the span
of back our hands couldn't reach, unshaved legs and we didn't care.
We were buoys, beacons, light enough to float. We never were mermaids.