The sea stretches tight on a slight, white horizon
unflurried by waves, by the clean, boneache moon.
The water rests awhile, passing slowly through the ribs of continents,
its deep, deep chest booming with the cries of extinct fish.

I am not dead, though the salt has lifted me out
and away, its sting green-silver like a safety razor edge.
It rubs away chromosomes, the earliest layers of skin
and remakes me pale and raw as a baby’s spleen.

The land abandons me. The last little fishing vessel
returns to its village, bearing upon its sun-slick floor
the heft of my cells, my tiny stillborn children.
I know I’ll never be a mother;

the salinity of my blood has risen steadily
these past million years;
it itches against my arteries
and calcifies in the deeper pockets of my lungs.

I tower over grassroots, vivid as a corpuscle,
drinking from the local well and dreaming of lysis.