Sinkers
by Elizabeth Oxley
To escape the heat, on summer afternoons
my two older brothers and I would retreat
into our basement to sit by lamplight
on wooden stools pulled up to a workbench.
There lay all the items we would need:
spools of fishing line, aluminium moulds,
a small pot for melting lead. Back then,
nearly everything was available to be touched.
In our first years, we clutched at seeds
that whirligigged down from the knotted boughs
of maple trees. A little older, it was fireflies
we cupped and tucked into glass jars,
watching them flash against the tender
blue screen of evening like potted galaxies.
If evening television could be believed,
come high school we might reach for another’s
hand, draw them into the clumsy harbour
of our own embrace. But in those middle years—
our limbs gangly as wet towels, our adult teeth
like billboards in our mouths—it was tools
we held, wanting to see how the world
could be made to bend to the will of pliers
and hooks. I followed my brothers’ leads:
melted the lead above the flame, poured it
into moulds. When it cooled, we released the sinkers
and clamped them to our lines. Then, like three
towheaded magi completing our spell,
we ferried our weighted rods up the stairs,
outside, and down four blocks to the creek
to stand among the rushes and jagged whir
of dragonflies, casting our orbs like stony eyes
into murky water, calling up the lives we knew
were there but could not yet see.
Elizabeth Oxley lives in Dublin, Ireland, where she is pursuing her PhD in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin. She was a 2022 Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award winner and has previously been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and Montreal International Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared on RTÉ Radio 1's Sunday Miscellany and in journals such as Heroines, Frontier, The Poetry Review, and The Waxed Lemon. She is currently working on her second novel.