I Was a Shark

by Elizabeth Wing

Image credit: Michiel Annaert on Unsplash

and if I stopped moving, I would suffocate,

            so, I covered the walls in paint.                      I held on to the underbelly of the sheep, my hands clawed in the fleece.

I was a child’s drawing of a raincloud, 

and I was the construction-paper teardrops underneath.

I needed a pair of rubber boots.         I needed the map I’d drawn on my inner arm with sharpie. 

I needed a distraction, so I took on love. 

I needed the wider view, so I became a mole.

I became a gravedigger for the still alive. They didn’t pay me well. 

Actually, they didn’t pay me at all.

They yelled at me to get off their lawn. 

I sold miracles door to door. 

I made one woman’s scottie dog speak in her dead husband’s voice and I turned another’s landlord           into a philodendron. 

I walked across a dark parking lot with a fistful of daisies. I was so patriotic. They should have cast me in National Velvet.

I let men tell me about their cars.       I became a terrible gossip.  I became the rind of a tropical fruit. I became a good christian boy with a hole in his soul the size of a clenched fist

I became a guest futon in the corner downstairs. I became a symbol

or generational squalor.           

I became a thing like a salt lick.  And then I  regrew my teeth. 

***

Elizabeth Wing

Elizabeth Wing is an incoming MFA Candidate and teaching associate at UMass Amherst, currently living in the Pacific Northwest, where she battles Himalayan blackberry and teaches children to track animals. Wing's recent work has appeared in ALOCASIA, Mudroom Magazine, The Washington Square Review, and other venues.