Facedown

He untucks his shirt
pulls down his zipper
pushes my head on his lap.
To me, it looked like the neon pink
monster sea worm
I once saw in a magazine.
Penis worm, they called it,
undulating at the bottom of the sea,
its dimple-eyed body pulsated
like my mother’s twisted
blue veins.
What would it be like
to float on the surface,
facedown, without sinking?
Arms loose and long,
would I hear the sound
of my heart beating?
Now, with my head still pressed
down by his football hands,
I’m swimming laps
at the Y,
stretching one arm,
then the next,
each breath no different
than the one
that carries me
to the other side.

Sherri Levine is a poet and teacher.  She lives in Portland, OR, where she teaches English to immigrants at colleges.  She teaches poetry workshops and hosts a monthly poetry open mic reading. Her work has been published in the Timberline Review, CALYX, Verseweavers, Willawaw, Driftwood Press, and other journals.  Her book, In These Voices, was published by Poetry Box in 2017.  sherrilevine.com

Judge Penelope Scambly Schott’s verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth received an Oregon Book Award for Poetry. More recent books include Serpent Love: A Mother-Daughter Epic about a struggle with her adult daughter, along with an essay in which the daughter gives her very different point of view, and Bailing the River, a poetry collection full of dogs, coyotes, and the unsolvable and sometimes funny mysteries of the ordinary. Her newest are House of the Cardamom Seed and November Quilt. Penelope lives a double life–in Portland where she and her husband host the White Dog Poetry Salon and in the small (pop. 604) wheat-growing of Dufur in central Oregon where she spends half of every week and also teaches an annual poetry workshop. She is building a cairn on Dufur hill.