The Oarfish's Ascent
NaPoWriMo 13/30
Apr 13, 2026 · 2 min read
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.
Comments (6)
Great work! You really have a way with words that flows while leaving me thinking it must've taken hours to bind the lines together so well conceptually.

“I’d wrestled your teeth out of some trench at the behest of my therapist.” I read this as defanging the poem (or battling publishing anxiety). Was that intentional?a