Today's poem is by Tina Barr

Deep
       

Outside, the call is a caw, deep in a throat, a gurgle
curled round the sound; it's no barn owl, but a bobcat,
beyond the shed in woods close in, a raking scream.

Like fate knocking in Beethoven's Fifth, a sound like
no other. The chill of my sister's necrotizing heart; her
words blistered, dry as the scar on my back, years old.

Crocodiles, once they have you by the arm or leg, pull
to the bottom. Sunk there, take you on a death roll,
over and over; the air bubbled up, your flesh ragged.

Before dinosaurs, sharks the size of a bus, double-fanged
teeth. Piles of teeth, like shells on a beach, in Fisher Branch,
Virginia. A megalodon's tooth is seven inches wide and high.

The size of a man's hand. It's jaw the size of an old
Volkswagen. Its doorway of teeth could crush six men
at once. These days our sharks shed teeth every two

weeks, press forward, so ones in the front lodge in surf
boards, skin. But whale sharks, the huge, polka dotted
mammoths, float open mouthed, for plankton they sieve.

One could pet them. They give birth to 300 live babies.
Laid out, these bundles, in a Japanese fishery. We kill sharks
for soup; netted, cut off the fins. Wounded, thrown back alive.

Angel sharks are shaped fans like a monk's shawl; tiny lengths
like string confetti trail either side of its mouth, attract fish.
Sharks are immune to cancer; you know we'll harvest their cells.

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Copyright © 2024 Tina Barr All rights reserved
from Asheville Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission