Debra Bruce

You Are An Inspiration! (No, You!)

                                          women's locker room 

No doubt she means it as a compliment,

the 40-something swimmer, an offering

to her elder, at 80 still shapely

from daily laps as she swings toward the shower.

“You’re an inspiration!”

            —which the older swimmer flings back

like a dropped towel she grabbed up off the tiles, 

“No you are an inspiration,” her glance grazing 

the younger woman’s span of shoulder from one

powerful arm to where the other arm ends

abruptly in a round knob, fingerless.

And now in silence hangs the compliment

like a stranger’s swimsuit left behind on a hook,

which might stay there all day—who wants to wear

what isn’t hers?—still damp, so intimate.

This poem originally appeared in Innisfree Poetry Journal.

Debra Bruce’s most recent book is Survivors' Picnic, and her poems have been published widely in journals, including Poetry, Shenandoah Review, and others. She has recent and forthcoming poems in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry and in Ecotone. Professor Emeritus at Northeastern Illinois University, she lives in Chicago.