Abyssal Self-Portrait
I met my other body
where the blue began.
It had no bones,
only weather.
One eye, dark as a locked chapel.
Eight questions
unspooling from its face.
I said:
I have been trying
to become more human.
It said nothing,
which is how the sea speaks
when it is being honest.
Its arms moved through me
like old thoughts,
like sentences I had abandoned
because they were too tender.
I was standing there
in the white museum of the page,
hands folded at my collarbone,
pretending I was separate.
But the squid knew.
The squid knew the body is only
a temporary border.
The soul, an ink spill released
under pressure.
It undulated closer,
soft cathedral of muscle and midnight,
and I saw myself
not reflected,
but dissolved—
being into tide,
tide into animal,
animal into question.
