When she taught me to swim, she said,
only breathe if you absolutely have to —
as if oxygen was not needed
to live.
I often feel like a gray holey dishrag,
damp and forlorn, as if deep rest were
a lottery ticket stuck to the fridge
since ‘94.
We inhale work and the too muchness,
numbing our chance to flourish, always
wanting more. Could we, for a moment,
be full?
I will unravel from urgency, the Rest
Deck says. And as a mantra, it moves
me more than most things, even as dead-
lines encroach.
To really live is to find other currency,
as if real companionship were a million
stars, as if this galaxy could hold me while
I sleep.
Ellen Skilton is a professor of education whose creative writing has appeared in Literary Moma, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Scapegoat Review, and The Dillydoun Review. In addition to being a poet, she is an educational anthropologist, an applied linguist and a Fringe Fest performer. She she has an MFA in Creative Writing from Arcadia University. She is also an excellent napper, a chocolate snob, a swimmer, and lives in Philadelphia with a dog named Zoomer, a cat named Katniss and some lovely humans.
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