When you draw the Atlantic over your red shoulders
like a comforter and submerge ten yards away,
I don’t know where I’ll see you next. I’ve checked
the sides of your neck for gills but grazed only stubble—
your lungs are strong as aquifers even after enough
Marlboros to buy the red bike dusting in our shed.
I pull in my knees, suspended in a cheerleader tuck jump
to hide snack legs from the sharks in my glossy books:
black-tip and nurse, ragged jaw sand and low-headed bull,
tigers, even, and whites from deep water cruising
sleepless for schools of dolphin and tuna, their teeth
winking on the pages I flipped in the museum shop
under the school-bus skeleton of megalodon hanging,
the one that breathed after I stared at the wheel
of black and white spirals on the second floor and I
can feel that thick-bone fish below me as you open
your eyes to the sting, to search the shape of my thighs
from a haze of silt. You stay covered for sixty breaths
while I watch the wind-hustled surface, waiting
for the taps of your hands like the brushes
of minnows rolled in current and now that ancient beast
clamps my waist, first jerks me down with a snort
of seawater and holds me there kicking and sightless, my ribs
beating out and in like pectoral fins the moment
before crunch and swallow and as I flutter with this panic
of prey, you lift me whole, curled as a hermit shell
plucked from bed and writhing as though wakened
from a sleep fast and dark as primordial undertow.
