Mollusc

Mollusc

Audrey Michel

Your oyster, sir. He sets down a silver shell, half of a hinged fish.
Above the vessel, seagulls wheel in a wind that smells of fish.

His wife’s belly, pressing against the white tablespread, swells
him. He remembers himself on a skiff with his father fishing,

or his father’s father, and the light flinging off his nacred catch.
Fish scent filmed on his skin and lips for weeks, like an accent of fish.

Edge your blade between its lips, he teaches, gripping his son.
This is the kingdom of God: a merchant in search of fine, nacred fish.

I will have to sell it all, he thinks, flipping the oyster onto its rocky back.
Who once found this tough and ugly bluff, the opposite of flesh, a fish?

Back when algae crusted at his wrinkled breast, when the blue crab scuttled
the reef made by his body, his brothers’ bodies, when the flounder and the herring

nursed in his alcoves—he would host five thousand at once.
He did not care. He conceived of sunlight. What was it like? —the fish’s

scales, its gluey eye bulb, the underside of a silver skiff?
Heaven encodes him with an itch, an overwhelming question, to fish

out from his memory of his father, or his father’s father, the shining seed
that burst into his open palm. His wife moves his hand to her belly, happy as a fish.

Lift up your heads, O gates! Let your words come fetal, Audrey, full of grace and truth.
Lift them up, O ancient doors, O rusted silver hinges of this incongruous fish!

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Audrey Michel
Poet & Researcher

Audrey is a poet and literary historian of the ancient Mediterranean. Raised outside of Chicago, she currently lives in Montréal with her husband. 

Photography by Philipp Deus