Boy Goes Swimming
Boy dives so deep his parents can’t see him, holds his breath pulling rucksacks of air into his lungs. Under the water, his belly scraping the bottom of the pool, Boy opens his eyes and just before the chlorine-sting he sees himself fish-tailed, seaweed-slick, more mermaid than man. Boy wants to breathe through gills. Boy sometimes feels like a life hooked through the lip and flailing on the end of a line. If Boy was a fish he’d want the world to throw him back, feel his spine kick, mackerel-flick of his tail as he hits the depths.
Lewis Buxton is a poet, performer & arts producer. He was selected as one of the Poetry School & Nine Arches Press Primers Volume 4 poets and been published in The Rialto, Magma, Ambit & Oxford Poetry. He is a Norwich Arts Centre writer-in-residence and currently lives in Norwich. His first collection is forthcoming in 2021.