This week’s poem, Michelle Menting’s “Breathing Room,” brings us beneath the surface of a lake and into a profoundly intimate practice of submersion. I love the tender tangibility of this poem’s description of bodies, and the wonder it conveys of an underwater world and bond.

Menting is the author of “Leaves Surface Like Skin” (Terrapin Books). Her recent poems, essays and stories appear or are forthcoming in Passages North, Cincinnati Review, About Place, EcoTheo Review, SWWIM and elsewhere. She lives in Whitefield and teaches creative writing and poetry at the University of Southern Maine.

Breathing Room
By Michelle Menting

My mother was buoyant,
in water she was a float
supreme, held no shame
in the folds of her body.

She’d let me climb atop
her one-piece, the suit
with straps that would slip off
her shoulders ashore,

but in the depths of lakes,
they’d rise, u-shaped twin halos
paralleling her neck. This
was but one part of her holiness.

Just beneath her collarbone,
right above her breasts, I’d hug,
careful, and only after ample
practice, to leave space between

my arms, her soft skin. Breathing
room. And we’d dive. We’d
submarine. With smooth winged
moves, we’d wave beneath

the surface. Below: minnows,
pondweed, wild celery, the one
bass nest. She’d point out
the bladderwort and I’d hold it

in no longer. I’d break
our stream of gloss
with bubbles of underwater
snickering. Remembering

the names of plants and fish
was for the surface. Once on
the lake’s horizon, we’d dip
below again, sink in

the fluid silence. Submerged,
our bodies turned vessel of one
on a single gulp of air.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Breathing Room,” copyright 2021 by Michelle Menting, was originally published in Radar Poetry. It appears by permission of the author.

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