Swimming Lessons | Sarah Freligh

We cling to the side of a swimming pool and kick, a line of girls kicking up a mist, a froth, a tidal wave. The sky is the color of cardboard, the water is cold. Pretend there are sharks, the instructor shouts. He’s a pair of sneakers and a bullhorn, the occasional shrilled whistle: Get the lead out of your fat asses. This is how we learn we’re not enough, that we’re Crisco, lard in the can, thunder thighs and jelly bellies, Miss Piggies and pork chops, who’d want to fuck that, that we’ll never be enough. This is where we learn to cry in the water, face down and silent. 

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis; A Brief Natural History of an American Girl (Accents Publishing, 2012), Sort of Gone (Turning Point Books, 2008) and We, forthcoming from Harbor Editions in late 2020. Recent work has been featured on Writer’s Almanac, appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018) and Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020 Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006.