What We Lost in the Swamp: Grant Chemidlin (2023)

Boys do not kiss boys. They catch frogs.
Is what I told myself the second it happened.

& there we were, hidden in the hemlocks of a secret swamp.
Your lips drifting away from mine like a silent ship

leaving harbor. Gone, as quickly as it came. I watched the shame
leap into the pond of your face. O the ripples.

How good we were at turning moments into paper,
into things we could crumple up & throw away.

You grabbed the frog squirming in my palms
& headed to the “cave,” to the crack between the rocks,

where the black & white striped garter snake
slithered into shade. How I wish I could say

that I stopped you, that I didn’t watch unhinged jaws
spring out like lightning, wrap around that poor

& unsuspecting frog, but I did.
Still too young to believe it, I wanted to see it

gone, eaten, that green & slippery part of myself
buried in the belly of a beast.

From What We Lost in the Swamp (Central Avenue Poetry, 2023) by Grant Chemidlin.

Grant Chemidlin is the author of In the Middle of a Better World (Central Avenue Poetry, 2026) and What We Lost in the Swamp (Central Avenue Poetry, 2023).

His journey into poetry began with a fear of being seen.

As a child, he loved writing stories, but around sixth grade, he began to understand just how vulnerable writing could be. He was closeted, and as his identity started to surface in his stories, he became afraid that his own words might reveal something he wasn’t ready to share. So he stopped writing. He put his creativity aside, leaving behind a part of himself he wasn’t yet ready to explore.

It wasn’t until his senior year of college that Grant found his way back to writing. A screenwriting class rekindled his love of creativity, and after moving to Los Angeles, he came out of the closet.