Skies the color of old aluminum
in the morning, when you can go

into the river and scoop shoals of tiny
fish in your hands— their ink dot

eyes and inch-long translucent bodies
weaving clouds under the rocks. Pale

drifts, smallest and ghostly, over-
lapping: so hard to tell one body apart

from another. And I don’t know anymore
sometimes if I am mother or daughter

or wife or teacher or friend; if I am scale
or chain or raw; if a thin line of smoke

coils me into submission before something
I cannot name scalds me and swallows me whole.

In response to Via Negativa: Sartoriology.