I was a swimmer. I swam. The butterfly stroke drives your head under, a drowning dunk, then lifts it miraculously out of the trough.
If you’re good. I was not. The underwater hum lasted longer than my lungs and my lips banged open into the waves of four swimmers, breath apocalypse,
but I could speak. I forgot a scream means you are not dying, only makes for a story about the boy who wept. The view into a tunnel is not the view leaving.
On the way to the hospital after the stabbing, I kept mumbling, I have seven minutes to live. She says that isn’t true, that I repeated I love you. Isn’t that just like me:
think one thing, say another. Color drains, like spilling water on work. Vision crumples, fades at edges, a sparkle vignette. There is no Anglo-Saxon word for intubate.
Choked, maybe. Stuffed. I know I am hiding. Do you think I don’t know I am hiding. Others can trickle
blood, but I need to hoard mine. I am too close to that lurching intake
of pool water, gulped-in, hurled-out like when I awoke and could not speak past the tube. The jay clucks a warning from the hedge. My throat flutters, full of chest.
James Ducat
James Ducat’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Penn Review, Carve, Bellingham Review, CutBank, Apogee, Spoon River Poetry Review, has been featured on Verse Daily, and is anthologized by The Inflectionist Review, Orangelandia and others. His chapbook A Field of Nopes is from Bamboo Dart Press. Follow him on social media: [email protected] (Blsky) and @ducatpoetphotographer (IG).
