Our canoe cuts smoothly through the water,
our bent paddles propelling us forward.
I’m in the bow,
my husband in the stern,
so I can’t see his face
when he tells me
how proud he is of me,
of the battle I wage daily
against my anxiety disorder—
our very presence on this lake a testament
to all I can accomplish.
When we first started dating,
I would panic when our canoe rocked
in water so shallow
it would probably not have risen to my hips
if I’d stepped out of the boat and into the stream.
He assumed then that making a life with me
would mean never getting to share his favorite place—
the Boundary Waters, a wilderness reachable only by canoe.
But more than a decade later,
here we are.
My breath steady and slow.
Elizabeth Dingmann Schneider lives and writes in Minneapolis. Her collection Blood is available from Red Bird Chapbooks, where she formerly served as a poetry editor. Elizabeth’s work has also been published in Drunk Monkeys, Sleet, Naugatuk River Review, the What Light Poetry Contest, Mosaic, and Saint Paul Almanac, among others.
