MASTERS SWIMMING

My umpteenth midlife crisis
curls my toes at the edge
of a starting block. The water greets me

like a nightmare. I’m not
what the neighborhood boys
used to call me--Caribbean Queen,

Chaka Khan, Dianna Ross,
my brown skin not so much browner
than those white boys’ skins

after a summer of swim practice,
but my mother . . .  there’s no denying
they heard their parents

talk about her, debate my parents
around the dinner table.
I can’t pass, have to hear my teammates

hurl my blackness at me,
hurl the names of beautiful black women
as I start a race.   

I wish I could execute smooth
dolphin kicks off the wall. I relearned
how to streamline my body for this race. 

During the last meters,
my worry turns to climbing out of the pool.
My arms worn out and useless

to keep me from falling back in.

STRAWBERRIES IN PLASTIC

I ride on a tractor-pulled wagon
with my son’s kindergarten class
to long rows of behemoth strawberries.

Plants run through carbon mulch
where we supplicate and fill plastic cartons
after washing our hands.

I grew up on the Ohio,
its banks dotted with chemical factories. 
My best friend’s father worked at DuPont.

We used to snack on wild strawberries
growing around a sand pile,
popped the tiny berries into our mouths.  

The plant settled a lawsuit, $671 million,
for contaminating the water
to make polymer for pans.

Michele Reese is a professor of English at USC Sumter and the author of the poetry collection Following Phia. Her poems have also been appeared in several journals and anthologies including Another Chicago Magazine, Atlanta Review, Blackberry, Penumbra, Poetry Midwest, The Paris Review, Chemistry of Color: Cave Canem South Poets Responding to Art, Hand in Hand: Poets Respond to Race, and Home is Where: An Anthology of African American Poets from the Carolinas. She resides in Florence with her two boys, her dog, and her bicycles.