Fish
by and published in Edition Two of Pomegranate
You brushed through the water
like dragging cloth through fingers,
silent swimmer ribbed with filaments of bone.
Your heavy empty face held two eyes,
flat black discs of cold plastic which
flickered, never blinked,
pressed in from the toy factory.
You swum through the black water like
something in space, in orbit,
you were a satellite, your scales
bounced images back to the surface.
Dragged upwards and twisting,
you struggled away from the surface,
stretched layer of sun-touched water,
kept the light from your stony skin.
You gasped the water, a lungless
soundless sigh escaped through the hook-hole.
Your back broke the surface, scales glinting like money.
Flapped flat and glistening on the oven warm wood
on a pile of timber, splinter and others like you
you tasted the air, retched at its clarity,
its weightlessness.
You lay flexing and crackling in the sun
A heavy oval, silver like a slice of the moon.
Facing the sky,
cave-mouth gaping like a wound, uncomprehending
you are handled, laid down, cut into three pieces.
Varnished scales drip to the deck like water.
Martha Sprackland
Martha Sprackland has been writing for more than ten years, and was twice a winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. She is (finally) about to graduate from Lancaster University where she reads English Literature and Creative Writing. She has had her work published in Iota, Brittle Star, Agenda, Magma and the Cadaverine, and is editor of Cake magazine.