Swimming Shelter

Author's Note:

The idea for writing one poem a day for 100 days emerged

slowly. In March, as we sheltered in place, I discovered that

putting poems on Facebook allowed me to communicate

with an immediacy that I usually only enjoyed at public

readings. It tasted like bacon, like strong coffee. Naively, I

thought 30 days would cover the worst of the pandemic.

As I considered shutting down my daily posts, returning

to sending poems out to small presses, I experienced a

sense of loss, of isolation, that troubled me. I kept writing

and posting, finding that I needed the electronic human

contact more than a vetted publication with little feedback.

Consequently, these poems have been self-published only

on my Facebook platform, and on occasion, on the Kansas

City Writer's Place website.

In Swimming Shelter the poems are arranged chronologically

as they appeared. Little has been done to revise, except for

an occasional word choice selection or punctuation edit.

I wrote each morning. Usually, stopping only when the

poem was finished. A few appeared with an immediacy

that surprised me. Other times, I worked off and on

throughout the day, giving them up to the internet late at

night, but seldom before I was satisfied. This went against

the grain of my personal writing process, as I prefer to edit

only after days or weeks have passed, letting the poems cool

for the critical cold eye. Self-publication scared me, sort of

like the time in junior high school, when I accidentally

kicked off my penny loafer into the middle of the basketball

court during a game. Ninth graders dribbled around my

sad shoe like they might a mouse from the biology lab.

The true embarrassment was that I'd forgotten to change

my socks after gym class, and so there I was, swinging my

dumb foot from the balcony in a sweat-stained sock.

Essentially, my social life was ruined, and I became a poet.

I'd like to thank Facebook readers who followed my posts,

especially those who commented on what they read. Their

words and emojis, likes and loves, let me feel like a village

poet, sitting around a smoky fire, probably Irish, weaving

words, inventing stories.

I kept the organic character of original diction in place. The

use of quarantine instead of stay-at-home or sheltering-in-

place is an example of learning terminology, new words for

a new time. The inaccuracies are honest. These poems are

not all about Covid-19, per se, but all of them, for better or

worse, were discovered while swimming in shelter, crawling

for calm water.