Mirage

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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I learned to swim inland. Somewhere 
in Maine my mother took me to a lake, 
a round, sandy bottom thing shaded by trees. 
We called it a beach as if we could make  
it so by naming it. If we called it love, 
then it was love. The first duty station  
I remember wasn’t even on a coast. 
There it snowed in droves and we lived in a house 
with green shutters. Or at least I think 
they were green. My memory’s broken 
sometimes like a naval base without a sea.  
My father told planes where to land,  
my mother cried into her soup, I read  
fairy tales in the closet and we called it  
home. At the lake I swam out to a far  
away dock. I cannonballed into schools 
of minnows. I shivered in my pink suit, 
the water cold like snow. 

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Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is a fat, bisexual, and invisibly disabled poet and memoirist and the author of Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) as well as the chapbooks The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press) and Pharaoh's Daughter Keeps a Diary (forthcoming from Kissing Dynamite Press). Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The McNeese Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Rust + Moth, and Atticus Review among others. A recent finalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition and the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, she lives in Atlanta where she is a PhD candidate at Georgia State University and an instructor of English and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College.