Aquarium, and Birthmark

Aquarium

You want to keep feeding the fishinside you, but you keep

eating the fish because you’re hungry.This is not the way it should go.

No one said you would not be hungry.You knew the dimensions of the aquarium

inside you, knew it was inside you.She who fogged the glass didn’t know

that you’d eaten the fish, but you did and do.You hear the aquarium inside your chest

crack, and before you know it, the carpetis soaked with bleached coral,

plastic kelp, and multi-colored gravel.This is not the way it should go.

This is not how anyone should go under—the water that you contained now contains you.

Birthmark

When ducks come in to land on a lake,they cup their wings inward to slow themselvesdown. I told her that’s what the birthmark

on the inside of her right thigh looked like.A drake mallard. A wood duck. Its outlineagainst the sky at daybreak. She traced

my kneecap with her finger, said she was tryingto memorize every detail of me for whenwe wouldn’t see each other again. I didn’t tell her

I was doing the same. My father used to take mebird hunting, back before I moved away. Doves,he said, flew different from the rest. They didn’t

flap their wings quite as fast, or as frantic; they flewmore smoothly than finches or sparrows. He madesure I aimed ahead of the target to make up for

the space the bird would fly once I pulled the trigger.Leading the bird, he called it. Don’t aim for wherethe bird is, he said, aim for where the bird will be.