I understand your need.
You’d devour me whole.
There is no reason to spare
whatever fits in your jaw,
shad, herring, your own young: all.
You stick to shallows,
test weed and rock-cluster,
live in worst water, clay and oil,
where the trout’s stomach fails.
I too know how to disappear.
I know to live off of leavings.
My ugliness has been lifted up and sung of.
Our justice is the same:
I too have been inspected
and judged deserving to die
on a scale made
of the twenty seven diminutive bones
in the human hand.
