by Shaelin Bishop
the doctor patches my ribcage
with fish bones & says,
“it’s a revolution. we have never made
one like you before. you are a revolution, girl.”
my mother tells him i want to be an architect
says i want to make blueprints
of myself. i am no insect,
i tell her. i am a wannabe arachnid,
an aspiring
cephalopod. i dream of being
mesozoic. i am
a widowed
creature with
my belly split open
on the table.
i guess i came here to be watched.
why else? being witnessed is the best
new painkiller.
instead i am agoraphobic & my kneecaps
are broken. i say it’s from praying
too much, my sutures
still dull & rusty. my skin
rejects this amphibian
fantasy.
“you’re fine,” my mother chants
while a dorsal fin
splinters from my back. gills
wring my neck. i tell her i was breathing
fine until we moved to this city––
foggy as a salty chernobyl.
this is my plea, rusting
from the backseat:
i have gears to take care of,
i have blood to take care of,
& if i have angel ancestry
it’s at least 20 generations removed.
i have outgrown holiness.
i peel off my fingernails.
i cough up minnows.
as a child, i enjoyed the feeling of sinking
so much, my mother
would not let me go
in the ocean.
SHAELIN BISHOP lives and writes on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh land. Their work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Ex-Puritan, The Common, Room, CAROUSEL, Plenitude, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Vagabond City Lit, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. They were longlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize.
How to Gut a Fish (When You Are a Fish) can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 6.1.
