~ DELTA POETRY REVIEW ~

Battered Victory

Winged victory, classic and Grecian,
I tell the sculptor, whose Vicksburg drawl

drapes my unclothed shoulders, whose hands
are already sizing me up, already imagining

the muscle of clay, ochre or steel gray dug
from the Carolina Piedmont, not so foreign

from my own karst and foothills west of Asheville,
my body more ebb and flow than terrain,

more Bosc pear than vessel, one breast
cupped for heft, for measure, where light

strikes where, crescent of hipbone, his finger
along my Caesarian scar, forty years healed,

too sensitive and shy for lovers—but there,
at the mons pubis, a shiver, like intimacy, passes

creator to model in the studio of white dust
that rides the soles of my shoes, that after firing

to bisque and glaze, will grace mantle or tabletop,
wings burnished teal or rust, another clash

                     with my hard night's better angels,
                     another battered victory.

Near Drowning

1
Out past the whitecaps something not bird
or buoy, something struggling—and we stop
walking as the sky pinks like the inner lip
of mussels, as others have stopped to clump
and point, and the owner comes along saying
his dog swims out all the time, no problemo,
but this time the riptide's strong below the hook
of Pawleys and no one's happy with the owner,
who launches his kayak, soon turning tail
in the high surf, outpaced by a motorized kayak,
a stranger slicing the waves for the sake
of this exhausted marvelous dog that has captured
every heart, especially my oldest granddaughter,
terrified in the thrall of rescue, though it all
works out—the stranger grabs his scruff,
the sheriff zooms in and ski-doos him home,
the owner looks peevish and sheepish
and not loved by anyone.

2
Drowning's always near, lashed to our mast
of overconfidence, like the year the youngest
girl walked into the pool without her swimmies,
without anyone imagining disaster, except
my daughter, who leapt from the chaise
to seize her child, sputtering minnow,
from the turquoise bottom—that moment
she snatched life from the splash of distraction,
the older kids knowing to dog paddle
in the deep end, noon bearing down,
the parents blind to every other possibility,
thinking out there, far out in the surf, spins
the real danger, though it all worked out—
little fish flopped on dry land, all of us gasping
for good air, so harrowing we rarely repeat it,
as if retelling would burst some dream
that still imagines the miraculous.

3
Busy in the bardo of dailiness, I bent
from one horizon to another, leaping
over crushed shells. I sometimes forgot
to breathe the air right in front of me,
so ordinary I rarely spoke of it—I forgot
the raucous summers in Calabash
that burned my most delicate parts,
even as they healed tight and glossy.
I forgot how quickly distraction rolls in
from the east, how sand shifts underfoot.
I thought the riptide, spinning far out, past
the barrier islands, wasn’t meant for me—
a competent swimmer, after all. Like any evening
at the Carolina beach when Vereen’s men
cast their seines for spots, when the horizon
bows to the sea and the sky's fine pink
is a mussel shell, I thought the walk
to the pier so safe. In the split second
between terror and grace, I never imagined
the eye of grief's vortex, rusted hook
of a marriage ending.

Linda Parsons coordinates WordStream, WDVX-FM’s weekly reading series, with Stellasue Lee. She is the reviews editor at Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel literary journal and has contributed to The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, Shenandoah, among many other journals and anthologies. Parsons is also playwright-in-residence for The Hammer Ensemble, the social justice wing of Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her fifth poetry collection, Candescent, is forthcoming from Iris Press.