Refabulation, Manhattan Beach, Florida
A surfcaster pulls a young hammerhead from the low tide,
the fish not quite the length of my arm. For the first time, I’m afraid
to dive right in. It’s not the sharks. It’s the chart I saw last week,
the doctor saying, Look, it’s like a cliff, scooped away, your breathing.
I didn’t see that image of diminishment. Instead, I saw a wave cresting
over itself. The surfcaster holds the hammerhead belly up,
like a woman holding a newborn whose gills flap in frantic gasps,
pulling useless air inside instead of water rich in oxygen.
As she wrestles with her hook, the gasping slows, a familiar
sequence: exhaustion wins, and you stop striving for breath.
Listen: the heart drums out its critical message: conserve,
conserve. Feel the hook piercing skin. The drug injections
made my skull feel huge and heavy, as if filled with molten lead.
I’m a sleepless little girl, afraid my dense head will break off
from my neck and drop through the mattress like an anchor
into whatever depths lie beneath the bed. In a moment, I’m an old
woman, with gills worn and scored. Now she has freed her hook
from flesh and lets the shark go, stepping back to see what happens,
as if she’s placed a sleeping child in a crib of waves. What if the child wakes
and can’t swim away from her? Or from the rip tide, or the chart
measuring my diminishment, or me, being wrong about everything.
the fish not quite the length of my arm. For the first time, I’m afraid
to dive right in. It’s not the sharks. It’s the chart I saw last week,
the doctor saying, Look, it’s like a cliff, scooped away, your breathing.
I didn’t see that image of diminishment. Instead, I saw a wave cresting
over itself. The surfcaster holds the hammerhead belly up,
like a woman holding a newborn whose gills flap in frantic gasps,
pulling useless air inside instead of water rich in oxygen.
As she wrestles with her hook, the gasping slows, a familiar
sequence: exhaustion wins, and you stop striving for breath.
Listen: the heart drums out its critical message: conserve,
conserve. Feel the hook piercing skin. The drug injections
made my skull feel huge and heavy, as if filled with molten lead.
I’m a sleepless little girl, afraid my dense head will break off
from my neck and drop through the mattress like an anchor
into whatever depths lie beneath the bed. In a moment, I’m an old
woman, with gills worn and scored. Now she has freed her hook
from flesh and lets the shark go, stepping back to see what happens,
as if she’s placed a sleeping child in a crib of waves. What if the child wakes
and can’t swim away from her? Or from the rip tide, or the chart
measuring my diminishment, or me, being wrong about everything.
May 2024
Michele Sharpe, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, adopted person, and former trial attorney. Her essays appear in Witness, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Poets & Writers, among other venues. She’s published poems in journals including Sweet, Poet Lore, and Salamander. She lives in North Florida.
Art: Reishi Mushroom by Kat Cervantes