Midlake Island

by Mimi White

I’d already let go of most of your body, not willingly, but with purpose.

    I’d been swimming myself away from what I could not have;

the insatiable longing.

    So while you were learning how to die,

I was the cartographer of your body,

thighs, back, head, groin what I had known and loved and thought were mine.

Map makers create paths into known and unchartered lands, the return

        as mysterious as my willingness to let go, the swimmer

who turns her back on land to find herself alone in open waters.