ROE

In the bloated night
swollen with bay water
I swim, cleaved.
One half bobs—caught in the endless slip of a dress,
toneless, gnaws on a fossil.
Plum-dark, heaving—are you still with me?
The other ferments below,
tethered by an umbilical
of twined seaweed.

To the one facing the moon, desire melts in her mouth
which swallows, and swallows, stuck agape.
The grazing catfish peck her feet,
opening portals with suctioned mouths
and doll-dead eyes, scrape out
the last of her roe,
exhaling.

To the one just below—I cannot look.
She has such old, pickled wounds.
She is just so hungry, such a bone.
Such a slow-mouthed thing, so salted
and cold, there, her womb that slow-boils.
Ah, but the silt of it, the mouth of it,
inhaling.

“This is an image of beauty,” you tell me.
Listen: it is not! to be skewered! or punctured!
Such a strange operating table:
a teacup on the back of the hand,
a tablecloth cobwebbed with inheritance—
floating. Not mine, this bay.
Not my mother’s.