Confession
Colin Pope

To the kid who dove headfirst
into the community pool,
chopping his way out to me that time

I pretended I could swim: sorry.
We couldn’t afford lessons

and nobody instructed me how even
to doggy paddle. Honestly,
baseball mitts or a hammock,

shorts made from something
other than cutoff jeans, we couldn’t
afford much, so it started to feel a little

like we couldn’t afford summer itself.
I only wanted, just once,

to reach past the boundaries of myself,
into the silhouette of what I could be.
Bikinis. Skinny dipping at midnight.

Weightless in the tepid water,
which was so harmless
it leaked from the sky,

so worthless I got angry at my breath
for trying to run from it and hide.
Oh no you don’t, I said,

just before you, stranger,
hooked your bare, angular arms
around my chest, so I’d have to know

a boy’s touch a new way. As savior.
Body heat no different
than a newborn’s mother, raising me

to choke and wail against the daylight.
Apologies, kid. I was young and poor

and I thought having fun
might be worth dying for.

Colin Pope’s most recent poetry collection is Prayer Book for the New Heretic (NYQ Books, 2023). His work has received two Academy of American Poets prizes and has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Slate, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and AGNI, among others. He is Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Northwestern University and works on the editorial staffs of RHINO and TriQuarterly.