The Lake Oswego Girls’ Soccer Team at the Hilton Pool

I cannot stop watching their sylph-bodies
leave and return to the water, each nub
of soft flesh, their dimpled hides.
They’re playing Marco Polo,
screaming out colors—purple, turquoise,
gold—sending bright sparks of water
over our heads. As each takes a turn
standing on the edge of the pool,
I get to watch their bodies at a stage of rupture—
or is it rapture?—the ferocious budding
so young it’s not begun yet
to collapse in on itself, each fragment
still holding to the unfinished form. I can’t remember
when my body didn’t look the way it does now,
fully broken open, split up the middle
and pouring out. They still believe
their bodies are their own,
that they are shaping themselves, choosing the form
they’ll take, as if they could know
the curve of the palm that will cup their breasts,
how their bodies will work to receive
another. Even this, they think they will decide.
Why would they doubt their own flesh?
What do they know of betrayal?

Keetje Kuipers