(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.