Edema
The eyes don’t focus.
Only the bluish boys, the ones
who never learned to swim, don’t
look back.
He disdains
that horizon, because it doesn’t
have a gaze. But blind
to his own reflection, six sharp
colors conceal that he can’t see
through the shimmer, to the dark
outline, those shadows that don’t
belong to him.
And the others,
braced with frost, would trick him
without looking. No recognition.
Saddest rainbow.
Bellevue Literary Review 13:2 (Fall 2013): 78.