Dry Damage

"This slicing in face-first,

this full contact festival of water on hot skin.

This cold wet everywhere awakeness,

first aid for the dry damage"

------ “In which skinny dipping temporarily fixes a life” by Anna Swanson

Dry Damage - a Glosa by K.D. DeFehr

It is the slow, inevitable drain

into this familiar façade of the blatantly mundane.

Twenty-seven brands of soap for one skin type,

leaky faucets, dirty laundry,

old wounds that never healed right.

And a job that pays the damned to be cursed.

Aching back, dry knuckles,

lost hair, lost sunlight - lost worth.

This is the daily grind, the unquenchable thirst.

This slicing in face-first.

It starts quietly, an inward inflection.

A bleak rhythm, a tenuous calling,

a mere disconnection.

And then it's drumming,

drumming up a fierce yearning to win -

an innocent's desire for some small measure of sin.

Unraveling now, the shedding of clothes.

The disbarment of garments until its just sand on bare toes.

Wading now, before jumping right in

this full contact festival of water on hot skin.

Drowned are the logical, rational, persistently true,

homogeneous, unvarying uniforms of ruth.

Bathed in soft twilight, where the pull of the tide

envelopes flawed flesh, gravity finally on the side

of floating, cascaded by waves.

Exposed to the fearlessness

of the heart of a world so recklessly enslaved.

Breathe here,

open lungs to this respiratory weightlessness

this cold wet everywhere awakeness.

Afterwards, in solidarity found at the edge of a rock,

everything varnished by the last sun drops.

Gleaming, reflecting off this shell, once spent,

swaddled in a sweater, lost to something heaven-sent.

Reborn, and rising anew to this place,

stripped of the burdens once encased - and now managed

by the sea and the wind and the lapping on the shore,

by the realization that old wounds should sometimes be torn,

to have a little salt rubbed in, and be re-bandaged,

first aid for the dry damage.

© "Dry Damage" is an original work of Kailey Dawne DeFehr. The poem is a Glosa based on the poem titled “In which skinny dipping temporarily fixes a life” by Anna Swanson, which was once shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. You can find out more about Anna at annaswanson.ca