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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.
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.
12/12 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Nicole Cooley + local writer Caroline Cabrera / The Gallery at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7-8:30 pm EST / Free
One workshop remains in our Workshop Series--SWWIM Lessons: From Prompt to Placement: “Surfing Submittable with Jen Karetnick – Keeping your head above water in the poetry submissions process” on 12/10 (register here). Price: $80/workshop. Time: 7:00–9:00 PM (EST). Where: Zoom.
Note: SWWIM Every Day is now accepting poetry translations for publication consideration. Please see swwim.org/submit for the full guidelines.
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Beautiful, visual, provocative poem. Thank you for the insight and hope, dear poet Julia!
Such beautiful use of language, Julia!