Skin Diving

First published in Lite Lit One, Issue Five, 2020

Chandler Swimming Pool

​We were never natural born

swimmers. At best, we’d try

sink all the way to bottom

of the diving pool, divine

some dizzy pleasure from

pressure on our temples

We’d call it a competition:

who could hold their breath

longest, crawl down deepest?

We measured it out with

pruned hands, never reached all

the way to onyx-tongued floors

Our lungs would deploy

like emergency buoys, return

us to surface before everything

went dark. Then we’d break for

arvo tea, eat sweet chili-sour cream

wedges, grin at our mums, digest

what we’d just done. We never

learned how to dive deep enough

to actually cause ourselves harm

But those brief trips underwater

taught me this: don’t go digging

up the dead, dive instead.