Denial
We meet each week. I tell her who I am
today: how, in disbelief, I am a nursery
of sardines. Go on, she says, and I speak
of our flicking, cross-hatched skins, our silver,
shoaling bodies, the swallowtail of our fins.
I explain our obedience to the pull
of colder currents, how we dine on blooms
of plankton, how oblivious we are as dolphins
wait to herd us toward a surface snatch,
as gannets mass to fire themselves — gold
hooded — a thousand arrows to the sea.
Anger
Next time, I’m fury sitting there. Zipped
in a zebra suit, my nostrils flare. One word
from her and my body is a bucking bronco
that never wants to stop. I’m fabulous,
of course — a fashion model with a perfect
arse — dressed to kill in symmetrically
shredded tights. I launch the designer
handbag of myself, thrash my tail and mane.
I hoof the box of tissues, boot old Freud
and Jung and Klein onto the floor. My kick,
we find, is fierce: too much for me to bear.
Bargaining
Friday, midday again, and I’m here
on the dot as a lyrebird on her chair.
I shrill, she nods in time to the rhythm
of my tiny, clockwork heart. I’m haggling
today with chirrups, whistles: What if?,
If only..., Why? Rehearsed on the forest’s
velvet-curtained stage, I negotiate
with all I’ve got these days: the tune
of chainsaws, the song of car alarms,
the camera shutters I must mime. I open
my throat, descant my own demise.
Depression
At last, one day, I come as myself.
The quiet holds us both. I try
to tell about the blue whale I’m trapped
inside. There’s so much we don’t yet know
about blue whales: how many they are,
and where they go to breed. But she knows
as well as me that a blue whale’s heart
is the size of a Ford Fiesta: each chamber wide
enough for a drowning woman to pummel
herself against, each beat a boom against
her bones, a deep-sea detonation.
Acceptance
The months strobe by. I shapeshift again,
again, begin to believe
in the transubstantiation of the flesh.
I am a deep-sea jellyfish, pulsing
disco lights of green and yellow, red. I am
a black-capped squirrel monkey leaning
on a ledge, an elephant doggy paddling
in the rain. I feel my fins grow in. I know
this darting synchrony: I am sardines again.
I am the white ibis who stands one-legged on a rock.
To the sound of distant thunder, I am
the bushbuck — alive, alive and licking salt.
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