Previous Issue: Spring/Summer 2010

Long-Distance Swimming  
Leslie Contreras Schwartz

“Looking up toward the sky on a breath, I watched the brightest stars travel across the heavens as we moved across the sea.”—Lynn Cox, who has set world-records for open-water swimming

In the middle of her midnight swim
from Catalina Island, the sky mixes

with sea, phytoplankton blossoming
from her mouth in trails.

Search the black-and-white
world between strokes for some small

point to anchor, a dot of a blinking light,
gleaming dim like a retreating flashlight in the woods.

Perhaps she imagines a thousand

tiny white lights, the kind that will usher

a fourteen-year-old through icy waters
for hours at a time, the sea opening up

beneath her to swallow what she can’t.
Only lights flashing, the lighthouse of herself

rising up to meet her on the continent,
some mainland she doesn’t have a name for yet.

Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a poetry student in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Adirondack Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Southern Women's Review, among others. She lives in Houston, Texas.