Rebecca Valley
The Memory of Swimming
In the history of my birth I arrive onstage
Watching the primary symptom of the affliction.
I move as a red balloon above my body.
I tangle in the limbs.
*
It was there I remembered:
An animal is precious.
We give them nothing but our names.
A lake is not unlike
the shallow pit of an eye socket
wet & uneasy a lake is
membranous is
always looking
*
Say a small brown beetle lands on the pad of my thumb. Whose crime is it?
I feel comfortable around invertebrates and
their helmet spines.
To sing a hymn to birth to sing
to comfort on roads without any houses,
too slick for houses
Among beetles I sing a hymn
*
Birds love to tell me I don’t belong here
I don’t know what it means to be
an animal
Only how to cry
in the grass
Rebecca Valley is a poet, essayist, and animal enthusiast. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Birdcoat Quarterly and other journals. She received her MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst, and is the editor-in-chief of Drizzle Review, a book review site with a focus on marginalized authors. She also curates writing prompts on making and performing art at home on Instagram @living_room_theatre. She currently lives in northern Vermont with two cats and a corn snake, but you can find her online at rebeccavalley.com.