On the Fifth Day and the Sixth Day and the Seventh Day, Too

The common carp won’t bite
if it can feel you watching:

a mother told each hatching egg what
a humble thing a body is to have—

frail even when it thinks
it’s a fortress          its edges soft

though we call them steel          though we
press palms flat to chests and measure

each beat as if it were sugar
precisely spooned from bag to bowl

(the recipe a reminder that once
we had no cake at all—

that the beds we sleep in are fever dreams
and the hands we hold are too)

With swinging knees, we straddle
scratched embankments, offering bread

to little fish rippling through greenish-gray,
reels dangling like lost stars, scanning the sky

for sailing boats that might
lead the long way home          while

there, in the water, fin after tail after
fin after tail all flit past wrapped

in a worried mother’s whispers
to keep careful, don’t forget, now

what a humble thing
a body is to have.