Somewhere Swimming
like everyone, I love children,
their fat leg rolls, their mussed hair,
their little sneakers lighting up the summer.
once, I was small like that, a curious wandering eye,
a bell or pinwheel turning my head,
the gap between my mother’s teeth
beckoning me back.
somewhere swimming inside me is a question
I don’t want to answer. it’s not my name I hear,
but something else, drowning in its own fluid.
a girl on the ferry smiles at me. I smile back—
& it seems to mean the world to her.
Copyright © 2025 by Kyla Marshell. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 16, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Like a lot of women, I’ve been living in the ambivalence of whether to have children for many years. This poem looks at the dualities of motherhood—your own childhood, your own mother’s personhood, loving children but balking at the responsibility of them. The question at hand is both ‘Should I?’ and a larger question that I can’t yet articulate or answer.”
—Kyla Marshell
Kyla Marshell
Kyla Marshell is a poet. She has been the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Cave Canem. Marshell lives in Brooklyn, New York.