Collection Week: Reminders of Water

by Megan Martin

You’d never seen an ocean.  You’d never seen anything like one.   

The first time we were on vacation. I found you down by the water on your knees where you’d stayed three days: enchanted by the empty, burning yourself out—freckles rushing your pale skin like parasites. 

Overnight your belly grew big with it.  You forgot my birthday.  When I reminded you, you said: here, a whole ocean, what a gift.  I took it anyway; blue fell through my palms: mutated, displaced. 

Back at home, an apartment eclipsed.  Ocean-photographs, ocean-books, ocean-postcards.  Ocean-soundscape blaring artificial from the phonograph like static.  Waves of ocean-projections disrupting our white walls. 

I’d find you face-down on the carpet, or face up: sunglassed, pretending so hard your nose had peeled, stingray plunged into your chest.  Nobody but you was invited.  But when you’d gasp awake in the night I was there. 

The ocean got messy; it got cruel.  Anemones and jellyfish draped over the furniture, rot-stench collecting in our paintings…seaweed-dinners…rough sponges of coral scratching open our backs…

Mermaids extended their fins to you, their offerings of waterlogged blondeness.  I was bigger, further reaching. 

I wasn’t— 

morning brought the whale-corpse, its lifeless, satisfied smile.  Everywhere else was emptiness, reminders of water.   

Nobody believed me when I said I hauled the whole bloat of it out of the window myself.