Refraction

The chlorine is a chemical blue that lies.

I look down and my shins are two pieces of driftwood

wavering in the surge, pale and mostly detached

from the person I thought I was on the pool deck.

I haven't been kind to this skin in a decade.

But here, the water doesn't care about the soft parts;

it just presses back. The hair on my thighs ripples,

flattening against the muscle as I kick through the wake,

and for a second, the light bends everything right.

I am not a list of regrets or a slow-moving body;

I am just a set of pale limbs moving through a liquid

that makes me look ghostly and heavy and new all at once.