Swans
Mary Simmons
I ask my wife, have I told you
the one about the swans?
the one about the swans?
As a girl, I thought every swan
was a jilted lover or a dead woman.
Every night for a year, I dreamed
swans. No one ever told me
this was about forgiveness.
I was a swan. God was a swan.
Purple hills were swans
ducking their beaks into the earth.
I would curl into my mother’s side,
my mother, a willow in the dark.
We inherit stories of swans who become
women and women who become swans,
but what of daughters, plucking
wet feathers under their blankets,
not knowing which they are?
Black beaks drag morality across
the banks, up, up, into colorless sky
shrinking against their shadows.
Some swans lay traps
under leaf beds, a curse for a curse,
if you still believe the water we choke
out has anything to do with luck.
Some swans are just swans.
I still leave them peas, when I remember.
Mary Simmons is a queer writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is a poetry MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she is the managing editor for Mid-American Review. She has work in or forthcoming from One Art, Moon City Review, Yalobusha Review, The Shore, Whale Road Review, and others.
© Variant Literature Inc 2023