Against Water

You refuse to let
the lazy river take you, fight
its current, holding tight
to railings, walls, my outstretched arm, anything
to keep from following the flow.

Salmon and steelhead swim
upstream so their young survive
long enough to hatch, to fight
for survival themselves.
You have been fighting
since birth. Against any water.
Doctors give us acronyms
to name your urges. Pills
to curb them. To help
fit in they say.

Salmon and steelhead
are the only fish to swim
against the current, yet
we call them fish, loyal
to labels outside our species.
You dunk another boy underwater
in a game he called murderer, and you
are named weird, strange, disturbed,
human, yes, but not quite.

Perhaps because an animal
who stands out will get
eaten and soon go extinct.
Unless, that is, it turns
its difference into strength.
One-fifth of all known fish
populations are declining,
the salmon and steelhead
mate and reproduce against
the river’s rush. They flood
their scales and roe, iridescent,
the opposite direction
of freshwater.

They are surviving.

You get knocked under
by the rush, emerge laughing, coughing, chlorine
thick on your hair, knee
scraped from the pool’s
hard bottom, red flesh
exposed like a gutted
sockeye, eager
to return to water.

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Julia Kolchinsky (formerly Dasbach) is the author of three published poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don't Touch the Bones, and 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023). She has two forthcoming books, PARALLAX (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025) finalist of the Miller Williams Prize selected by Patricia Smith, and When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027), a collaborative collection with Luisa Muradyan. Her recent awards include Hunger Mountain's Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and Michigan Quarterly Review's Prize in Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. She is at work on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia's birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.