At fifteen, I started taking courses at the local community college full-time through Running Start—Washington state’s dual enrollment program. Except for my penultimate quarter, when only a 6:30 am Composition II had space, I would usually arrive on campus hours early because I would come straight after swim team practice or else get a ride with my dad who would catch his bus into the city from the park and ride next door. I spent those mornings in the library, building my first website on GeoCities and reading through the back issues of literary journals. I can still smell their cardboard file boxes.
One of these journals was Hawai’i Review, so it is a special joy to see my poem “Neutral Buoyancy” appear in HR’s 85th issue, Occupying Va: The Betweenness. The poem is also the first in a sequence of SCUBA-related poems that I am currently working on.
