this side of the ocean by Holly Steventon (Lucent Dreaming Issue 10)

summer meant skipping the days away on the flat side of the ocean.

meant the sky opened up in an arc of light as the moon pulled the tide
like a pearl on a string.

we’d burn real easy, you and me — caught out under that heat like
flayed fish down at the mongers, all glassy-eyed and slippery smooth,

bodies not yet weathered to the world outside the salt and the sea
and the stones.

summer meant sitting on the groynes and watching the world slip
away. the sun nothing but a blazing drop of copper over the velvet

blue, the steady sounds of your hand line reeling in, the ebb and flow
of the waves sloshing like sand in the bottom of an hourglass.

i never could listen to you about all that — too caught up in the writhing mass
of bait in that little arcade tub. the way your small, clumsy hands would

push them through the hook, that wet squelch as something living caved in.

summer meant early mornings and late nights.

meant the carnival and the grass and the taste of artificial strawberry
stuck to our lips like sun lotion across our skin.

back when the loose change in our pockets felt like freedom. when
we’d chase ourselves through the hall of mirrors, hands outstretched

and colliding with the image of bygone days, bodies tattered patchworks
of then and now, the scar at your temple shining a shell white under the
fluorescence.

summer meant our toes in the sand and the sun at our backs.

meant you and me and the fish, time unfolding around us like wool from a spool
with nowhere to go but out.

meant we had nowhere to go but out — all long, growing limbs and no way of
putting it all back again, no way of reversing the sun or pushing back the days.

meant ten lingered on the horizon like storm clouds blowing in, like one more year
until it all ended — until i’d wake up and get ready for a day without you in it.

fetch your hand line again. show me how to catch a crab with fresh bait impaled
on the hook.

i’ll listen this time, i promise.