two by two I am split apart

the moon resembles a giant alloy coin its white metal reflection on the water blistering my face, shark circling, a centrifuge of moonbeam and a dorsal fin in rapture a pantomime of my hands in prayer position, oh angels I have forgotten how it feels to put my palms together in supplication, lost at the pew, this compressed patella which clicks now upon genuflection I really just need one hail mary just one bone thrown just one minute passed through a meat grinder with an aperture the diameter of my new gray hair

take a good long look for your god who put my blood in the water who could never lay eyes on an arm inside the throat of a shark so they dispatch you instead who is too busy for another grown woman with her elbow locked in hyperextension on a holy mandible, like how the plaster of paris sacred heart stiffened on our mantelshelf, just another lady with her hand and fingers disappearing down the giant dark mucosal hallway hallways are always a child’s nightmare full of inevitability of omens of a hero’s journey into the kitchen for a bowl of cereal after a bad dream oh mom I’m scared I can’t see past something so hungry for me

so my little night-sweaty fingers grip a spoon a thousand years ago it might as well have been the moon to me with sweetened milk the color of a monster’s tooth how could a mind so little be so biblically afraid and yet this shark has a particularly pronounced smile I observe before the jaw shuts itself through me and two by two I am split apart and the part of me that can write this is doing so by an iridescent submarine light caught by the slanted breath of its gray gills with all the time to kill in the hunger of a beast I wonder if I will remember come morning