How to Breathe Underwater

Take one look around before you put your head under and take a sip of the chlorine.

Feel how bad it hurts in your chest and throat and brain,

and then remember how much better it feels than all the blank walls and dirty rubber and shit grades,

and all the blank-faced grown-ups               

with blanker-faced children who got too big too fast, so that the colors in the air got to be too much for their lungs.

Cough and cough until there’s nothing left to do but breathe in, and pick one last thing to look at in your head—

—make it something beautiful like bubbles of wind under a long gray sky.