By Sara Lynne Puotinen
Lake Nokomis, Minneapolis
to what I need to
know and this is it.
After making eye
contact too many
times with a trio
of hairbands settled
on the sandy floor
I have decided
ignorance is better.
I will believe all
that’s here is me &
water me swimming
water wanting to
hold me up help me
glide go about its
business unnoticed
prepping for splashing
kids boarding paddlers
diving ducks floating
bandaids dearly missed
nose plugs easily
replaced hairbands and
whatever else joins
us in the lake. By
next week the water
will be opaque light
brown steel blue pea soup
green or on extra
sunny days lentil
dal yellow and I
won’t think about
what it contains. I
will rarely bump in-
to fish only once
step on a sharp steel
something and never
again remember
the hairbands sad and
stuck on the lake’s floor.
Sara Lynne Puotinen lives in south Minneapolis, near the Mississippi River Gorge, where she reads and writes and tries to be upright and outside as much as possible. She earned a B.A. in religion, an M.A. in ethics, and a Ph.D in women’s studies, which all inform her experiments in paying attention and her playful troubling of what it means to write while moving, to move while writing, and to do both while losing her central vision from a degenerative eye disease (cone dystrophy).