By: Anthony DeSantis
A boy and his mother undulated over
the chlorine sea and an exact moment:
learning to swim, remembering breath.
Only the sounds of liquid existed. They
reminded the mother of when her child
crafted waves in the bathtub by hand.
She taught her son to tread the water,
and the boy wondered if his mother forgot
about when she burned him with a cigarette.
Now, he fused his arms with hers and said
something like, I know it was accidental,
just envelop me in your hair until the end.
She’ll yearn for it all to happen again, but
stop holding her son above the crystalline
surface. The boy has to learn sometime.
Mother and child, severed by the rippling
of a time-conscious pool, will always love
each other, submerge together, resurface.
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Bio: Anthony DeSantis is a junior in the Creative Writing Department at the
South CarolinaGovernor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. He writes
largely to examine things from a variety of perspectives. Nothing is more
important to him than influencing a person’s thoughts and feelings
through what he writes. Along side his passion of writing, though, Anthony
loves to study theatre and foreign languages. His infatuation with
Spanish language and culture began while he was growing up in South
Florida. Anthony feels that this childhood has provided writing material
for years to come.
