Melanie Challenger
Shark
It docked towards me, and snatched,
taking
a jumbo steak of me
a whole verse of my body’s poem
the vers libre that began, let-me-touch,
and finished, don’t-let-me-go. Swallowed
the early cinnabar crowns, Peters-pence,
then took inside the forget-me-not-blue
of its mouth my whole arm
like baby-Moses returned to the amnion.
My whole arm, its kissed hub
of shoulder, unbirthed
inside this shark, circling, rose-grey
coelenterate of womb
floating in the sea’s astonishing
fuselage, as if the sea is a woman.
I watched in the shark’s spaceship-port-
hole-eye my arm like Venus gliding
past, into the vast Venice of outer-space,
as if this shark was a woman, or space
could be the body of a woman.
I felt the shark’s hide slip over me
until I was her, I was this shark,
the erogenous deeps of the Pacific
welled in me such love and glee:
the lady shark inside
inside the woman that I am,
pursuant, pursuant, pursuant.
Page(s) 70
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