The Cross-Atlantic Swimmer

The Cross-Atlantic Swimmer

Was not born into her namesake

She loose-lock keyed herself free

From the wrong side of the line

And made a swim for it

Two days and a slue of clanked doors later

She found herself beached

Breathing hard for the first time

And hoping to learn to live without her gills

One of the hardest skinned fish

I have ever met

She gnawed the bars of her new home jagged

And sawed the scales from her skin

Here,

Rib raw and smooth

She looks just like the silently armed men

That take her from room to room

Insisting she grow legs

And learn to speak through the flaps

She once used to breathe from

These men make their language ugly

A broken beam of light

Which should fill rooms and create

But instead blinds

And forces a seclusion it refuses to allow

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Has only a handful of her past

A picture

And memories of a home she hoped to rebuild

Back of the wrong side of the line

She stole her son away

From the shark of his father

Spilling red wine

From the tooth-broken taught skin of her leg

She stowed him at her sisters

And made the break

To take back the freedom she

Wasn’t even allowed to fake

On this side,

Sanely contained

Behind bars

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Screams asylum

And falls on ears which refuse to unplug themselves

Here,

She knows only

Cactus-wrapped love

And no gloves

She sits frozen and foreign

And stands to be called both

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Wants only for her son

To know that she can still wade in the water

When she is granted the chance

To know that the shark

Did not drink itself drowsy on the wine of her leg

But alone and shackled

She can only tell the story

To outside legged and gilled visitors

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Will sit silently broken and gasping for breath

Until we stop capturing the broken

And the hopeful in America

Until asylum can become itself

Instead of the ugly mane of reluctance

It now knows

Until we treat the swimmers of the world

As wine emptied victims of sharks

With stories what need to be told

If we refuse to swim

With these women and men

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Will have to stay

Wretchedly creature

Until she paddles her way home

Remembering how to breathe

And in disbelief of the day she can live