With my chest all net,
what you drag must seem worthless.
A half-devoured dolphin,
more bone than breathing,
and riddled with roundworms,
rosettes of remembered teeth and tongues
and love, the color of dirty dishwater
and infants' fingertips.
I am all dorsal decay, slipped scales,
silvered silences, froth, fronds, and fintips.
A bottomfeeder's graveyard grotesque
of old flames, fondly drowned in my dread.
But you, with your hands,
tightly wound in the weft,
and she, with hers, turning twine
to recover the rest,
never set me to sinking,
drag me up on the deck.
My man at the maw
and my girl at the gut,
the two of you pull porpoise
from rot, wrench
cartilage from kelp,
and as sun strikes your shoulders,
she gasps, grasping the gulping gills
of a puffer, pulled from the slickness of sea.
Its eyes the circles of sighs,
it flaps its tail at your fingers,
cradling its curve, and she sees it,
the way it sees her, and she breathes,
the way my net should, and all at once:
You are tide.
She is ocean.
I am fish, and
I will never
stop
feeling.
