Barbara Barnes

The Eleven-Minute House

I wanted to see how deep I could go
Amber Bourke, free diver

I would fill my lungs before wish-making,
or to silence my tread across a creaking floor.

I plunged my face into a bowl of water
and my mammal-mind rehearsed its blood plan.

So when the ocean opened its trapdoor,
I dropped through easy as light

down the blue afternoon. I promise you
descent is gentle, water’s embrace is your mother.

Seventy meters under I went inside— the architecture
of a single breath. I moved through bone rooms

strung with rubies, in the left chamber I turned
the clock to the wall, flung a window wide,

the curtain sighed against me like a child.
A bell rang and I became butler, showed myself out.

The return was a steep highway in dense fog,
reaching the surface might have broken me,

blacking out came as rescue. Strong arms slithered
me onto the deck, my gasps were salt-scabbed.

Voices asked for a human secret, I had only this—
there’s more than you think, enough to last.

Barbara Barnes’ poems have appeared in Poetry London, Butcher's Dog, Perverse, Ambit, The Brixton Review of Books, The Alchemy Spoon and Magma, as well as in anthologies including Cry of the Poor (Culture Matters), For the Silent (Indigo Dreams), Crooked Jukebox, and Invitation to Love (the6ress). Her first collection Hound Mouth won the Live Canon Competition and was published in 2022. It is available from the Live Canon website. instagram @barbaracbarnes.