The Oarfish's Ascent

Photo Attribution: By Georges Cuvier - Planche N°69 du livre "Le règne animal distribué d'après son organisation", CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26131322

I’d wrestled your teeth out of some

trench at the behest of my therapist.

I look on that first poem I’d

let escape into the abyssal plane of the

Internet and wonder if I’d’ve kept going

knowing how much I’d have to sharpen

your fangs again. It took me a few weeks

to let my husband’s titanium submersible

turn to gaze upon your serpentine

gait. I’d feed you on the remnants of

greater whales before me.

In midnight water an occasional

star of nacre aches open in you.

How it craves to shine! It digs into each

sinuous scale. It implores you to seek

the surface. Across your eyes light leaks.

The pressure that holds you eases. Our

swim thrashes in the shallows. Why is

the bottom so bright? Luminous

our insides swell until form

is a suggestion from the trenches we

left. Shape is no longer mine or yours

to hold.

I hope you surfaced from this poem with all of your organs intact and hopefully entertained or interested in some sort of way! I took inspiration for this one from the concept of bareleveling as detailed in Talicha J. Poetry’s FreeWrite Week 43 prompt, which you can find here.