Shark In Shallow Waters
For Sarah Everard

How foreign-delicacy we must look
So glittering-feast for silver handcuffs like fish hooks
On the fishing lines of Met police
Our fleshy white meat
Scattered like bait in the woods

We all clenched-jaw, shark-teeth keys now
Double rows of razor-sharp between knuckles

Dragged up on the dock and weighed
Price gouged for market
Fish-eye frozen on a casket of ice
2.99/lb

What do we taste like?

Watch how deftly the fisherman scrapes our scales
And commits to our deboning
The sharp, metallic knife and our blood
Just trying to cut a path back home.

---

Alise Versella is a Pushcart-nominated contributing writer for Rebelle Society whose work has also been published in Academy of the Heart and Mind, Circle Show, COG Magazine, Crack the Spine, Entropy, Enclave, The Opiate, Penumbra Literary and Art Journal, Poydras Review, Ultraviolet Tribe, What Rough Beast, Steam Ticket, Elephant Journal, and Wrath-Bearing Tree, among others. She has recently published a poetry collection, When Wolves Become Birds (Golden Dragonfly Press). Versella has worked with author Francesca Lia Block and Women’s Spiritual Poetry, whose latest anthology, Goddess: When She Rules, raised money for the Malala Fund. Kirkus has called her “…[A] boundlessly energetic and promising technician [who] crafts a unique blend of the symbolist and the confessional; a talented, promising newcomer.” She performs at local coffeehouses in Southern New Jersey and has taught poetry workshops at local libraries and schools.