Perch

Fetched from Wedgewood depths
you are all grease and muscle,
an impulse without seam,
stark and amoral as an arrowhead.
I take you, palm countering palm,
the decision to render.
Life? Or death?
Above, staggering and drunk on their own screams,
gulls tip and roil, dip and spiral,
a mob too keen to muster.
You do not fathom me,
chalky ogre that I seem,
my fingers feverish and dirtsmelling.

I fish because it is not required of me,
because it feels like staring into a vault filled with jewels.
Sometimes, I imagine my little girl with me,
Christmas happy and clapping circus noise along the shore.
“Say to the fish like the horseyman,” she clatters.
“Whisper how Mommy ate detergent
because I was just a bean inside her.”
This is how we begin:
a hormone imbalance, craving only wrong things.

Your babies float about you,
translucent and oval as planets,
and you—practical to the point of cruel—
suck them into your stomach.
You hate my thin sky,
the papery feel of wind against flank and fin,
the shoal of clouds frantic as they gallop over.
Your wellbottom eyes,
odd and unblinking,
drops of oil beading dark soup.
Those eyes,
intolerable, otherworldly,
failing to comprehend,
even as I allow you to kiss your own bent reflection
in the water.
This is about me.
This is me letting myself go.

--Mitchell Hegman