(at twenty weeks pregnant)

One morning at the beach, a girl tipped
a bucket of fish in my lap

and I was rudely hauled up
out of myself, left reeling in the shock of cold slick

bodies on my bare skin, their eerie
iridescence drowning out the heat, in the slipperiness

between our worlds,
in the scales laid out like tiles on a roof

and which, in another life,
might have unfurled as feathers on a wing.