Down to the Water


Once I had a dream that I was trapped in a body that had been used and discarded. Naked, I lay in a riverbed waiting for my body to be found. I remembered the hours that led to me being there, and I felt lifetimes of sorrow and sadness that had been suppressed for so long that it felt like weights on my chest plunging me deeper below the water’s surface.

As these kaleidoscopic memories flashed before my eyes, once more I blamed myself for winding up there. I never blamed him. Not until I felt the brush of another porcelain foot against mine. In death, our memories twisted and reshaped into one, and through her eyes I can now see so perfectly clearly.

My sister, I’m so sorry I didn’t do more, that it couldn’t have ended with me, I’m so sorry I never held him accountable, and I’m so sorry I will only ever meet you here on this plane that I reach only through my dreams. I feel your pain so close to my chest that it feels like it might break, and I still feel the weeds of the river gripping my wrists and ankles like earthy cilices. A part of my heart and soul still lies there in the riverbed with you, and I will do everything I can to make sure that you, and no one else who has met the same fate will ever be forgotten.

‘Down to the Water’ is a ferocious war cry that brings to the light all women lost or forgotten to domestic violence and patriarchal oppression. We see you, we love you, and we will never forget you.



Well I’ll take you down to the water

We’ll take our clothes off

Sink right in

Let our bodies tangle with the weeds

Let ‘em prickle at our skin

We go down to the water

Let it wrinkle our skin


Like two islands in the Cayman

We float here in the black

Wait for nightfall to arrive

Or for the tide to take us back

We go down to the water

Let it wrinkle our skin

Feel our faces become amorphous

As they sink beneath the surface


Well don’t be afraid of what they tell you

How some people never return

Let the sand swallow your feet

And feel that icy wind burn

We go down to the water

Let it wrinkle our skin

Feel our faces becoming ageless

As they sink beneath the waves


Last night I saw the ghost or apparition of a woman

Who might have been me

Loveless and hardened she crawls across the floor

Before

And after

I lie awake at night, sleepless and afraid I might be taken back there

Seaweed jittering across my skin

And the cruel sucking and slapping of water

It feels alive in my throat

I’m at rest I think

But it isn’t restful

City lights across water

A false sense of hope

Water breaking in the distance

Every night nightmares of shivering, shimmering water

Whispering, waxing, waning


Shivering, shimmering

Glittering, glistening

Blistering, kissing

Dripping, slipping


Tethered, untethered

Severed, remember

Remember, remember, remember

Rinsing, christening, baptism

Sinking, sinking, sinking

 

Sink with me

Say my name


Rinsing, christening, baptism

Sinking, sinking, sinking


Sink with me