When I Was a Child I Knew I Was Water – a poem by Linda Carney – Goodrich

When I Was a Child I Knew I Was Water

I’d sneak into lovely of the dark street.
Such relief. No eyes
would see me go to the beach, 
shed body, dissolve, float, and rise. 
I’d relax out the fold of myself,
enter canopy of sky. 
I knew then the secret 
returning to body. Water in shell. 
knew I had emerged from foam, though 
they said I came from a woman’s body.
One day, they say I nearly drowned.
They forced me back to earth and stone.
I had tried my experiment of becoming 
water in the public light of day.
Crawled head first into the blue and gray.
Waves took me, sand below fell away.
I was meant to be water. 
Sudden alarm, fingernails tore my arm.
A sister snatched bathing suit straps,
dragged me to shore. A mother screamed,
slapped me back in the body once more,
disrupted and chastened, skin-scraped.
My soul then a rock in the pocket of my body.
Waiting.

Linda Carney-Goodrich is a writer and teacher from Boston whose work appears in Lily Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, Anti-Heroin Chic, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Literary Mama, among others. Her first book of poetry, Dot Girl was published Feb 2024 with Nixes Mate Books and was a finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Poetry Prize. You can find more about her at lindacarneygoodrich@yahoo.com.