There’s a girl who ties herself to a rock with a rope around her waist b/c she is alone, she wants to be safe, she wants something solid. The rock allows her to be in the water but not to venture out, to explore. She becomes bored. A few months pass before the girl realizes the silver fish swimming below can go beyond.

She waits for one to swim by her belly, she unties the rope from the stone. She waits. The silver fin moves around her ankles, up by her thigh. She makes a loop, pulls it tight. The girl leaves the rock quickly; she is swept away from everything she has ever known.

It is almost as if she does not remember anything except being pulled. The water is colder. She can taste it in her mouth. It takes her under where there’s no light, her eyes adjust. Her body learns to fit into small places, to offer little resistance.

Sometimes there are wonders, colors she never imagined tied to the rock but then the coral rips at her hands, she becomes smaller still. She’s always moving, always thinking of what is ahead, how her body must react, what shape she must become. She tries to predict the movement of the fish, make it her own.

The girl is tired. She watches for other silver fins, other places where she grab hold but she’s afraid now and fear covers her, so she lets herself be pulled. The girl avoids thinking, concentrates on the way her body must move to avoid pain. The world losses it’s color, its taste. Her eyes look straight ahead but never around.

Until one night when the fish sleeping, one night when she is awake and wondering, how she might untie the knot from the fin and it slips off so easily she barely can feel the freedom. And for awhile she follows the fish b/c her own weight is unfamiliar--it's like waking up from a dream. She has no where to go, nothing to hold so she follows the fish through the small cannels.

She is no longer a girl. She understands this. She's spending her life following the silver fin. She knows there's more even though it is hard to believe to make eyes look around.

The rope around her belly begins to tighten, to itch. She begins to see she does not need the rope at all and one day, that is neither night nor magic, she unties herself from herself.

She begins to swim.

I walk into your closet
as if you’re dying
run my fingers

down linen, breathing in, as if
I’m also dying

and my mouth is a moth,
hungry for destruction.

I want to destroy
like clothes on a hanger,
dark to light.

I’ve sewn our eyes together.
Needle, straight hook.
Two match pillows.

If I name you Zombie
will you walk to me?

If I call you corpse,
let go of my hand.

We did not believe in anything,
salt stayed away from our shoulders
even our shadow did not follow.

Wistfully we untied our fingers,
spoke every prayer backward, waited
for emptiness, the pure abandonment of it.

Our hearts became ponds,
shallow inlets of water. Cold,
the one word we said without guilt.

We named each other.
What covered our hunger
was a mirror

but not smooth or clear,
distorted by temperature, it was
a lake we could not walk upon.

Water we dare not drink.